Consumer Protection

Joining agencies that regulate cars, toys and other consumer products, medical devices and airline service, today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rolls out a searchable online complaint database. The CFPB's new tool, for credit cards to start,  comes in the nick of time to help consumers who the LA Times warns may be tricked into automatically signing up for an over-priced junky Citibank add-on monitoring service.

You can pick your friends and even your bank but you are stuck with the credit bureaus.  Over the last twenty years the power of the big credit bureaus to act as gatekeepers to consumer success in life has grown immensely. Credit reports and credit scores generated from them are used to decide whether consumers can get a job, get car insurance, qualify to open a bank account, rent an apartment, use a debit card and, of course, whether they can obtain and how much they will pay for credit. The Columbus (OH) Dispatch has an excellent four-part series explaining that the credit bureaus make mistakes, lots of them, and ruin peoples' lives. There is hope, however, since the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has new tools to rein in the bureaus.