The acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said the agency will protect financial institutions as well as consumers during a speech at a credit union conference in Washington, D.C.
Mick Mulvaney, who President Donald Trump appointed to lead the consumer protection agency in November 2017, reiterated to the audience at the Credit Union National Association's Governmental Affairs Conference that the CFPB will focus on enforcement as opposed to rulemaking.
Mulvaney, who has long been a vocal critic of the CFPB and its structure, joked about expectations for how he would run the agency when Trump named him acting director.
"People thought that I was going to set the building on fire, fire everybody when I got there, and that's not the case," he said. "There is still a role for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in this nation, and we're still going to be trying to protect consumers. We're simply going to be doing it differently."
Mulvaney said the agency will still help protect consumers who use credit cards, but it will also work to protect those who provide the credit. The CFPB will help people who borrow money while being "mindful and respectful" of the banks and credit unions that make those loans, he said.
Mulvaney said he was talking backstage at the conference with a couple of credit union leaders who told him their institutions are now out of the remittance business because they could not figure out how to operate it safely under the current regulatory environment. "That means that there's a service that people needed, that was important to them, that is no longer there, and there is a cost to that," he said.
Another change, according to Mulvaney, is that CFPB leadership is doing a cost-benefit analysis of regulation.
"We actually do look very, very hard at the true costs of that. As I told the folks at work, there's going to be a lot more math in our future at the CFPB," he said.
Mulvaney also took some light shots at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who was responsible for setting up the bureau post-financial crisis, and who has been an outspoken critic of Mulvaney's leadership. He joked that if Warren does not like what he is doing she should complain to the person who wrote the statute.
"And for those of you who don't know who wrote the statute, she did," he said.
