Changes are in the works at a federal agency responsible for protecting consumers from banks and other lenders. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is targeting “unfair discrimination in consumer finance” with its new rules. But Straight Arrow News contributor Star Parker argues this is an effort to expand government, similar to the moves that created the bureau during the Obama administration.

In 2008, Democrats wasted no time to ascribe the financial collapse to business greed and insufficient regulation of banks and other financial institutions — at least that’s what they said.

By 2010, the 2300 page Dodd-Frank Act was passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate.

It added 400 new regulations on financial institutions. Included in the tsunami of these new financial regulations was the creation of a new independent agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This agency, originally the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, was conceived with her view shared by most Democrats on the far left, that any disparities in financial results between Black and white Americans must be due to racism and discrimination. 

As always, in the view of progressives to fix any and every problem is that an all powerful bureaucrat somewhere here in Washington, D.C. is needed to level the playing field.

Thus from the passage of Dodd-Frank till today, our financial institutions, banks, securities firms, credit unions, payday loans, et cetera, et cetera, all fall under the purview of this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which we can call the CFPB, and they must submit to its scrutiny and its oversight and now never let a crisis go to waste.

Those philosophers of “we don’t let any serious crisis go to waste” are back in power, and the CFPB has just announced sweeping new changes — sweeping new changes in what they call in quotes: “Supervisory operations to better protect families and communities from illegal discrimination.”

So now firms that are under the purview of this CFPB — they must make available to the agency. They’re in quotes, again, “processes for assessing risk and discriminatory outcomes, including documentation of consumer demographics and the impact of products and fees on different demographic groups.”

We might summarize this as financial market oversight gone totally woke because we have to ask ourselves: Can a government bureaucrat really determine why a banker did or did not make a loan?

And we have to ask ourselves: Should the heavy hand of government be involved here at all?