If you’re a car dealer or finance company who wants nothing more than a little bit of guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a bipartisan group of Senators has your back.
The group of 22 Senators – 11 Republicans, 11 Democrats – sent a letter earlier this week to the CFPB asking for clarification on why the agency issued a rule in March many think seeks to limit dealerships’ ability to discount customers’ interest rates.
The inquiry, led by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), asks CFPB to “provide complete details concerning the statistical methodology the Bureau employs to determine whether disparate impact is present in an auto creditor’s portfolio.”
It also asks for the CFPB to answer for not allowing public comment about the rule before it was handed down in March.
The letter references a similar effort to get answers from the CFPB by members of the House Financial Services Committees, saying the CFPB “has not provided complete responses to several of the questions presented by our House colleagues.”
The full text of the letter is available here.
The concept of fairness has been based on the assumption of a 100% payment ratio (no delinquencies, repos, no collection activity, no cost of servicing the account, etc) so it seems that the new norm is that pricing according to the risk seems “abusive”; we are not to far from legislators deciding who can and who cannot get financing; preventing people from getting credit will hurt them in the long run. Consumer groups insist that a big number of customers do not understand the financial transaction but lack pointing the enormous resources the industry makes available to enhance financial literacy and also lack of a basic understanding of one the premises of consumer behavior “if the customer wanst it, the customer is going to get it”. Pretty soon will hear that buying a pair of sneakers for $150.00 when the cost was $9.00 is abusive and it should be a price cap of $5.00 for all sneakers.