The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. – William Jennings Bryan, 1896
The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, coined the term ‘junk fee,’ and has begun restructuring how financial markets work, removing medical debt from credit reports, fostering competition in credit cards, and examining big tech’s entrance into payments. And yet, for ideological reasons, to many bankers, Chopra is a villain running a government agency full of bureaucratic demons, whose goal is to force them to do paperwork on behalf of nebulous ‘consumers.’
So it was a weird day last month when Chopra had a room full of mortgage bankers nodding their heads in furious agreement, and even angry at their own trade association for helping a monopoly take advantage of them. HousingWire’s James Kleimann and Sarah Wheeler were shocked, calling it “Must-See TV.”