April 24, 2018: Money Talks Loud and Mick Mulvaney and the President Are Ready to Listen

 

4/24/18:  In a talk to hundreds of Wall Street bankers, Mick Mulvaney, Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) tells his audience how they can help the Big Orange Buffoon drain the swamp. The bankers can throw bags of money at him, and he will fill the swamp and displace the water. (See: 4/23/18.)

 

Scott Tucker got sent to prison.

 

Annual interest rates as high as 950 percent. 

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” the former congressman explains. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” 

Money talks loud. 

Mulvaney listens. The payday lending industry donated $60,000 to his campaigns while he was in Congress.

 

Now, as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), he is to protecting consumers, as E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt is to protecting children from toxic chemicals in their drinking water. Pruitt wouldn’t care if a chemical company mixed pesticide into a child’s pudding. Not if he could cut regulations on pudding! Mulvaney wouldn’t protect a consumer if two bank executives started beating him or her over the head with bags of quarters in the bank lobby. 

Mulvaney recently dropped sanctions against one online payday lender, NDF Financial Corporation. NDF operates out of Canada and makes illegal loans now and then – in all 50 states. NDF has a slick system to milk customers of every penny. It’s part of an 11-company operation, all playing different roles in bringing in desperate consumers and shaking them down. 

Suppose you need $500 to pay off unexpected medical bills. (Not that anyone in the GOP would care.) NDF and associated companies will lend you the money for fourteen days and charge you a fee of $134.90. You’re a poor guy. After fourteen days you can’t pay back the loan. You take out a new 14-day loan. That means another fat fee. If you get stuck in this cycle the annual interest/plus fees rate you pay can reach 700%. 

Under Mulvaney’s leadership-in-reverse, CFPB also dropped a lawsuit aimed at a group of Kansas payday lenders accused of stealing millions from accounts of consumers who failed to pay debts that…well, to be honest…they didn’t owe. You can tell these lenders were legit because they operated out of a call center and made cold calls to people, to suck them into their web. 

Kansas officials couldn’t stop them because they incorporated on an Indian reservation in California.

 

The Kansas City Star explained the beauty of this predatory scheme: 

The business model used by the four companies mirrors what’s referred to as the “rent-a-tribe” structure, where a payday lender nominally establishes its business on American Indian reservations [emphasis added], where state regulations generally do not apply.

 

Some payday lenders favor the model because they can charge interest rates higher than what states allow.

 

How high? According to a complaint originally filed by CFPB (before Mulvaney took over) interest rates could range from 440 to 950 percent annually. 

In the good old days, when President Obama was in office, the feds brought a successful case against one Kansas operation, like NDF, incorporated on an Indian reservation. Scott Tucker, head of the company, received a seventeen-year prison sentence for fraud. His lawyer got seven years. His brother, Joel, got nailed for a $4 million fine. 

Fellow Kansan Tim Coppinger also took a hit when CFPB was run by a Democratic appointee. He was forced to pay $54 million in restitution in a class-action case.