Title X of the Dodd-Frank Act is entitled the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 (CFP Act). The CFP Act establishes the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB or Bureau) within the Federal Reserve System (FRS) with rule making, enforcement, and supervisory powers over many consumer financial products and services, as well as the entities that sell them. The CFP Act significantly enhances federal consumer protection regulatory authority over non depository financial institutions, potentially subjecting them to comparable supervisory, examination, and enforcement standards that have been applicable to depository institutions in the past.
Every day across America, consumers face issues with credit cards, mortgages, car loans, and student loans. When they are cheated or mistreated, all too often they hit a brick wall against the financial companies. People are fed up with being run over by big corporations, and few have the resources or expertise to fight back on their own. It is no wonder consumers feel powerless: they are outgunned every step of the way. Since 1970, the financial industry has doubled in size. It is the biggest source of campaign contributions to federal candidates and parties, spending about $1 billion annually on campaigns and another $500 million on lobbying. The four biggest banks each now has more than $1 trillion in assets. Financial products have become a mass of fine print that consumers can hardly even read, let alone understand. Growing problems in the increasingly one-sided finance markets blew up the economy in 2008. In the aftermath, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Sharing the stories of individual consumers, Watchdog shows how the Bureau quickly became a powerful force for good, suing big banks for cheating or deceiving consumers, putting limits on predatory lenders, simplifying mortgage paperwork, and stepping in to help solve problems raised by individual consumers. It tells a hopeful story of how our system can be reformed by putting government back on the side of the people, to strengthen our families, safeguard the marketplace, and establish a new baseline of fairness in our democratic society.
Welcome to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Your Money, Your Goals: A financial empowerment toolkit for social services programs! If you're reading this, you are probably a case manager, or you work with case managers. Finances affect nearly every aspect of life in the United States. But many people feel overwhelmed by their financial situations, and they don't know where to go for help. As a case manager, you're in a unique position to provide that help. Clients already know you and trust you, and in many cases, they're already sharing financial and other personal information with you. The financial stresses your clients face may interfere with their progress toward other goals, and providing financial empowerment information and tools is a natural extension of what you are already doing. What is "financial empowerment" and how is it different from financial education or financial literacy? Financial education is a strategy that provides people with financial knowledge, skills, and resources so they can get, manage, and use their money to achieve their goals. Financial education is about building an individual's knowledge, skills, and capacity to use resources and tools, including financial products and services. Financial education leads to financial literacy. Financial empowerment includes financial education and financial literacy, but it is focused both on building the ability of individuals to manage money and use financial services and on providing access to products that work for them. Financially empowered individuals are informed and skilled; they know where to get help with their financial challenges. This sense of empowerment can build confidence that they can effectively use their financial knowledge, skills, and resources to reach their goals. We designed this toolkit to help you help your clients become financially empowered consumers. This financial empowerment toolkit is different from a financial education curriculum. With a curriculum, you are generally expected to work through most or all of the material in the order presented to achieve a specific set of objectives. This toolkit is a collection of important financial empowerment information and tools you can access as needed based on the client's goals. In other words, the aim is not to cover all of the information and tools in the toolkit - it is to identify and use the information and tools that are best suited to help your clients reach their goals.
“Timely and important . . . It should be our North Star for the recovery and beyond.” —Hillary Clinton “Sperling makes a forceful case that only by speaking to matters of the spirit can liberals root their belief in economic justice in people’s deepest aspirations—in their sense of purpose and self-worth.” —The New York Times When Gene Sperling was in charge of coordinating economic policy in the Obama White House, he found himself surprised when serious people in Washington told him that the Obama focus on health care was a distraction because it was “not focused on the economy.” How, he asked, was the fear felt by millions of Americans of being one serious illness away from financial ruin not considered an economic issue? Too often, Sperling found that we measured economic success by metrics like GDP instead of whether the economy was succeeding in lifting up the sense of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and security of people. In Economic Dignity, Sperling frames the way forward in a time of wrenching change and offers a vision of an economy whose guiding light is the promotion of dignity for all Americans.
Consumer Credit and the American Economy examines the economics, behavioral science, sociology, history, institutions, law, and regulation of consumer credit in the United States. After discussing the origins and various kinds of consumer credit available in today's marketplace, this book reviews at some length the long run growth of consumer credit to explore the widely held belief that somehow consumer credit has risen "too fast for too long." It then turns to demand and supply with chapters discussing neoclassical theories of demand, new behavioral economics, and evidence on production costs and why consumer credit might seem expensive compared to some other kinds of credit like government finance. This discussion includes review of the economics of risk management and funding sources, as well discussion of the economic theory of why some people might be limited in their credit search, the phenomenon of credit rationing. This examination includes review of issues of risk management through mathematical methods of borrower screening known as credit scoring and financial market sources of funding for offerings of consumer credit. The book then discusses technological change in credit granting. It examines how modern automated information systems called credit reporting agencies, or more popularly "credit bureaus," reduce the costs of information acquisition and permit greater credit availability at less cost. This discussion is followed by examination of the logical offspring of technology, the ubiquitous credit card that permits consumers access to both payments and credit services worldwide virtually instantly. After a chapter on institutions that have arisen to supply credit to individuals for whom mainstream credit is often unavailable, including "payday loans" and other small dollar sources of loans, discussion turns to legal structure and the regulation of consumer credit. There are separate chapters on the theories behind the two main thrusts of federal regulation to this point, fairness for all and financial disclosure. Following these chapters, there is another on state regulation that has long focused on marketplace access and pricing. Before a final concluding chapter, another chapter focuses on two noncredit marketplace products that are closely related to credit. The first of them, debt protection including credit insurance and other forms of credit protection, is economically a complement. The second product, consumer leasing, is a substitute for credit use in many situations, especially involving acquisition of automobiles. This chapter is followed by a full review of consumer bankruptcy, what happens in the worst of cases when consumers find themselves unable to repay their loans. Because of the importance of consumer credit in consumers' financial affairs, the intended audience includes anyone interested in these issues, not only specialists who spend much of their time focused on them. For this reason, the authors have carefully avoided academic jargon and the mathematics that is the modern language of economics. It also examines the psychological, sociological, historical, and especially legal traditions that go into fully understanding what has led to the demand for consumer credit and to what the markets and institutions that provide these products have become today.
The Tcl language and Tk graphical toolkit are simple and powerful building blocks for custom applications. The Tcl/Tk combination is increasingly popular because it lets you produce sophisticated graphical interfaces with a few easy commands, develop and change scripts quickly, and conveniently tie together existing utilities or programming libraries.One of the attractive features of Tcl/Tk is the wide variety of commands, many offering a wealth of options. Most of the things you'd like to do have been anticipated by the language's creator, John Ousterhout, or one of the developers of Tcl/Tk's many powerful extensions. Thus, you'll find that a command or option probably exists to provide just what you need.And that's why it's valuable to have a quick reference that briefly describes every command and option in the core Tcl/Tk distribution as well as the most popular extensions. Keep this book on your desk as you write scripts, and you'll be able to find almost instantly the particular option you need.Most chapters consist of alphabetical listings. Since Tk and mega-widget packages break down commands by widget, the chapters on these topics are organized by widget along with a section of core commands where appropriate. Contents include: Core Tcl and Tk commands and Tk widgets C interface (prototypes) Expect [incr Tcl] and [incr Tk] Tix TclX BLT Oratcl, SybTcl, and Tclodbc
Provides an in-depth overview of the Federal Reserve System, including information about monetary policy and the economy, the Federal Reserve in the international sphere, supervision and regulation, consumer and community affairs and services offered by Reserve Banks. Contains several appendixes, including a brief explanation of Federal Reserve regulations, a glossary of terms, and a list of additional publications.
