Washington Post Offers Interesting Profile of New CFPB Enforcement Chief

The most important thing you should know about me is that I’m firmly pro shoes in the workplace. The least important thing you should know about Richard Cordray, former Ohio Attorney General and current Chief Enforcement Officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is that he pads around shoeless in his new digs.

Cordray is profiled in a Washington Post article, and if the name sounds familiar, it’s most likely because of his reputation as a hard-liner against abusive debt collection practices. In September of 2009, Cordray went on record as the standard bearer in the Ohioan war against collection agencies. “A line must be drawn,” he said, “to keep debt collection from crossing over into harassment.”

Making good on that promise, Cordray’s office went after a large collection agency “for harassing consumers when attempting to collect on debt.”

As Ohio’s attorney general, his actions were pretty localized. As Chief Enforcement Officer for the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (set to open this summer; free hotdogs, and balloons for mom), his fighting technique may be unstoppable.

This is good news for consumers and anyone angry at banks. The news isn’t being greeted with the same level of enthusiam elsewhere. As Camden Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, told the Post, “Richard Cordray was known as sort of a regulatory zealot in Ohio and generally was pretty tough on the financial services industry within his state.”

I’d like to explore two different avenues of thinking on this, if you’ll bear with me:

(1) On one hand, I don’t think being a regulatory zealot is necessarily as pejorative as Fine wants to insinuate. A little regulatory zealotry, for instance, might have been nice back in, oh, the early 2000s — or any moment before the housing bubble burst and we started reading daily articles about people getting mortgages under their dog’s name, and that dog having pretty bad credit in the first place. Labeling someone as a rule-follower as your major form of criticism might not be the most effective means of winning others to your side of the argument.

(2) On the other hand, it’s not like the world loves debt collectors. And this barrier to appreciation makes it easy for regulations to be piled on regulations in the name of consumer protection. In those scenarios, it’s less consumer protection from harassing debt collectors, and more often consumer protection from accountability. This is not to suggest that there are no justified complaints out there. This is to suggest, however, that justified and unjustified complaints get lumped together in the interest of creating drama. That drama leads to further regulations that make it increasingly difficult for companies to recoup their bad-debt losses.

(Bonus) They don’t even need to be especially nice shoes, Richard. They just need to be shoes, and they need to be on your feet, because I’m pretty sure you’re making eleventy-one percent more than I’m making (I think they categorize me as a volunteer for tax purposes or something; I’m paid in gold stars and high-fives), and I have to wear shoes in the office. I mean, honestly.

Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, hand-picked by President Obama, selected Cordray for his new position after his failed re-election bid in 2010. “[He] has the vision and experience to help us build a team that ensures every lender in the marketplace is playing by the rules,” Warren said in a statement regarding Cordray’s hire. It’ll be interesting to watch what kind of broad strokes Cordray will paint with on his newer, larger canvas.

Which brings us to today’s Insta-Poll: How do you feel about shoes in the workplace?