Today I speak to Rohit Chopra. He was director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until the end of January, when President Donald Trump dismissed him, as well as to the Elon Musk government department (DOGE) began to dismantle the agency.
The CFPB has existed for just under 15 years now. The Congress created the Agency following the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from various types of loan and credit schemes that led to this crash.
In general, the CFPB was quite popular! This is the agency that protects consumers from predatory loan practices, limits credit card costs and survey on various types of financial fraud. So, closing it effectively has launched a number of controversies, the least of which is: Trump and Musk even have the power to do so? After all, the CFPB was created by the Congress with a law, and the American Constitution says that the president is supposed to take care that the laws adopted by the Congress are faithfully executed and not reinterpreted by an unadumped billionaire who is deeply in the crypto. In fact, I don’t think that it came with the founders at all, even if it’s been a minute that I watched Hamilton.
All this led me to ask Chopra several times which has actually made the decision to dismiss him, which is currently responsible for the various policies of our government, and if one of these things is added to a clear plan for which someone can really be held responsible.
I ask questions like this on Decoder All the time, and there are generally answers, even some of the most powerful executives in the world. In fact, in particular some of the most powerful executives in the world. But here, well, you will just hear Chopra say, again and again, that he does not know. Honestly, I don’t think it knows it – and it should probably be as worrying as anything.
He and I also talked about the confrontation between the two main factions of the Trump coalition. On the one hand, there are the libertarians of musc technology, then there is the most populist Magi Wing. Currently, these two factions are fighting on the prices (and it is always difficult to say what is going on there), and they seem ready to be potentially even more in contradiction because Trump reshapes more from the government.
The CFPB is in the middle of this fight; It is much easier for Musk to transform X into a crossed application with a cryptographic payment platform if there is no regulator on the pace. But the celebration of the party is not exactly in love with the big banks and the great technology earning even more power. I do not know how it will take place, so I was curious to see if Chopra had a glimpse – and what was most worried to happen without an agency like the CFPB custody.
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