It's Madness

Katie Kieffer's latest article is about Elizabeth Warren. Warren has been tapped to be the head of the Consumer Financial Protection bureau and is unacceptable to Conservatives because she wants to protect Consumers. And anyway, according to Kieffer, they don't need protection.

Does Warren want financial companies to write contracts at a second-grade level because she assumes consumers are too dumb or lazy to read the fine print? She tells Time Magazine that consumers shopping for loans, “… drown in a sea of words that are theoretically disclosures, but they scream, ‘Don’t read me.’”

Mortgage brokers do not go to bed at night dreaming up confusing fine print clauses. Financial companies write lengthy contracts partly to comply with existing regulations and to protect themselves from consumer lawsuits. And Warren wants more bureaucracy?

I think this wouldn't stand out as much if I weren't in the middle of studying the Mortgage crash of 2008. In recent history we have examples of Mortgage fraud on a massive scale, and Kieffer, in so far as she is aware of it, blames Government Regulation for the avarice and predatory lending practices of this industry.

There is a story, quoted in the movie "Inside Job," and the book "All the Devils are Here, The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis," in which 15 or so of Mortgage options offered by Countrywide were placed before Greenspan. He commented that someone with an advanced degree in Mathematics still wouldn't be able to determine which of them was the best deal. And this is the system that Kieffer and other Conservatives are fighting to preserve; they want predatory lenders to have impunity.

Sometimes I believe there is truth in the theory that Conservatives can't tell the difference between money earned and money stolen.