A Powerful Force for Good
Robust law enforcement is crucial to a fair market. Companies that lie, cheat, or steal take advantage of consumers and the honest companies that they compete against. Congress gave the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau two powerful tools to combat fraudulent, deceptive, and abusive practices by big banks and financial predators. One was the authority to bring public enforcement actions against corporate violators, and the other was to send supervisory teams into the companies themselves, to inspect and monitor how they treat consumers. This chapter tells how the bureau developed and combined these tools and then used them to put over $12 billion back in the pockets of consumers who had been wronged. It also discusses how the bureau used supervisory oversight and enforcement actions to prevent or halt systematic ongoing abuses such as deceptive marketing of credit card add-on products and discriminatory auto lending.