One of my largest expenses that I'd like to see regulated is the Federal Govm't. How can they continue to spend more and more? Why do they give dish out money to so many useless things and causes? I want talk of of having a smaller federal budget. You cannot begin to talk about cutting taxes until spending is cut.

@simonsays666: That's right Simon! And guess what happens if they find that they actually save money by consolidating the agencies? They'll expand their budget and/or create a panel to oversee them.
Here's the best way to help consumers--quit spending our money!! I can't even talk about tax cuts when the Federal Gov continues to grow and spend more money.

@wcnghj: @Tankueray: Anytime you talk about caps, it sounds un-capitalistic and gives the govm't more control. But, I think it's open discussions about bonuses and having them revealed that shame these places into cutting back those things themselves.

How about obliterating the current credit reporting/FICO system while we're at it? A silly 3 digit number created by a corporation with a proprietary formula should never have been allowed to become so important to ones daily life.

Also, coming soon from BoA: a CFPA fee, sufficient to pay all the penalties due for charging other ridiculous fees.

I could be wrong on this one, but few people actually read these things. No-one would know what's in it.

Your comparison chart is misleading - it fails to draw all the lines both before and after to DOJ, the 90 plus US Attorneys and all of the State Attorneys General. And it confounds efficient and effective.

Given the cat's coloring, I guess we can call her Cash Cow.

"The CFPA would also have the authority to designate fees, charges, or behaviors as unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices, and ban them as the agency sees fit."

This seems like a very very very broad mandate. I'm very skeptical of gov't efforts to put price caps in place, and that's what this seems to amount to.

I like this, but how are they going to decide? And how long would a committee take to decide it? Government is not known for swift action.

How about fines on executive pay for violations? That would get attention very fast.

My fear is that regardless of what the agency becomes empowered to do, banks and their kind will come up with ways to preserve their existing profit levels. Just like how they've been changing their terms & conditions before the new credit card 'reform' bill goes into effect. Talk about a giveaway. And any change the agency does come up with will have a similar long lead time so the banks can put in new rules before the reforms kick in. Any new laws have to have an effective date of something like 10 days after signing. Too bad if their computer systems can't deal with it. That's what refunds / credits are for. And we could have let them mail out promos that were technically legal at the time, but once the law went into effect, they could not process any applications. Seems simple to me (but I'm sure people will disagree).

I work for an agency that hands out fines. Some things can carry a fine of $10,000 per day. This is nothing to the banking industry, rather a cost of doing business. They won't be scared until the fines are much higher and are assessed per incident, per day.

And, they'll just raise the cost on the customer to make sure they keep their profits up. No more free checking and we know credit cards are already more expensive, they'll find fees to add that they can get away with and hit every customer with them.

What they really need to do is cap the executive salaries and bonuses, so there is less incentive to use profits for the shitheads that sit around and think of these fees all day.

It has the potential for good, but it has an equal potential to be abused.