The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the brainchild of far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has been known for some time as an unaccountable, poorly run rogue agency. This agency is one of the best arguments for taking the axe to the federal behemoth, and yet it still has its fingers in the American financial system. But in a recent attack on a banking system in Ohio, they seem to have interpreted the “protection” part of their name in a whole novel way – as in “Protection racketeering.”
Admitting past mistakes may be passé among Ohio Republicans these days (ahem, JD Vance). But here at Buckeye Briefing, we are ready to admit when we were wrongWe are also willing to give credit to the mainstream media when they dig up truly valuable information.
And it seems the nice people from the Cincy Enquirer have done just that in response to federal regulators’ attempts to attack Ohio’s own Fifth Third.
Aggressive sales quotas. Lax internal controls. Little consideration for customers whose financial well-being was at risk and whose complaints were ignored by employees seeking financial incentives.
That’s the unflattering picture painted by court documents and other federal regulatory agencies. Fifth Third Bankthe largest bank based in Cincinnati and one of the region’s Fortune 500 companies.
[…]
However, the documents also show that federal regulators have encountered difficulties in investigating imitation accounts: Judge at the US District Court had doubts as to whether they had found evidence of unauthorized activities.
Regulators have been unable to identify any alleged victims of Fifth Third’s controversial practices, and the Enquirer’s attempts to locate affected consumers in the case were unsuccessful.
The CFPB alleges a crime – but there are no victims. They claim that Fifth Third’s “controversial” practices harmed consumers – but did not create such consumers. It looks like the regulators made this all up.
See also: CFPB sues zero-rate lenders over lending practices
Rogue agency: GOP lawmakers scrutinize Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
So who was hurt? Anyone?
So: The CFPB was pursuing a case related to acts that allegedly took place before the CFPB even existednot to mention that the bank had the authority to conduct such investigations and actions. It pursued this case without any actual evidence of wrongdoing, and to date, no one has been able to find anyone who was actually harmed by the alleged actions. Fifth Third essentially paid the CFPB off its back, sort of like a corporation paying money to a mafia protection racketeer. And now the bank is being named alongside Wells Fargo (which we can personally confirm opened at least one account we know of without the account holder’s authorization) for making a financially and legally clever but reputationally foolish move to stop the CFPB’s harassment.
This is quite an indictment of one of the agencies most loved by Democrats, and especially by Sherrod Brown.
Did you understand the first part? That was basically a retrospectively Investigation.
This really smells like protection racketeering: “Nice little banking system you have there, Fifth Third – would be more of a disgrace…” happened And that, folks, is always the problem with overregulation and government overreach — to further their agency’s mission and protect their imitation jobs, regulators are incentivized to find problems even when none exist. In this case, those perverse incentives led the CFPB to invent victims that didn’t exist, file claims for which there was no evidence, and cost an Ohio company a lot of money it never should have had to shell out.
This brings us to the CFPB question: Is it the victim or the crime?
This seems appropriate.
