Thursday, January 9, 2014

A Movement For Consumer Rights And Getting A Good Credit Score

By Louis Jake


The machine of credit scoring and reporting is evidently in dire need for reform. But exactly how are we possibly going to get it? Getting a good credit score and keeping it should not be an impossible task, but with predatory lending and endless lobbying by major companies keeping consumers ground into dust it seems like a hopeless struggle. Not to mention the face that the entire credit scoring industry is almost a monopoly-type situation.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2010, ensures that you are now eligible for a free copy of your credit score if you are denied a loan based on that score, and also should you get a high interest rate on a new personal loan. This is a positive improvement. But what is the motto of nearly every Republican candidate for president? Repeal Dodd-Frank! Meanwhile the Obama administration is less than willing to push on some consumer legal rights.

Warren designed CFPB as a watchdog that could oversee credit scoring and reporting practices and function a recourse to consumers. The bureau released a beneficial preliminary study in July 2011, which considered how scores purchased by consumers and those shown to lenders can vary, leaving consumers in the dark about their actual creditworthiness. We can be thankful that the bureau is doing these ongoing investigations. But without Warren at the helm, and given CFPB's positioning within the bank-centric Federal Reserve, its impact will be restricted. The industry, along the politicians it lavishes money upon, will try to stymie even its most moderate efforts.

The reality is that reforms are crucial if we want to truly take back our lives from these credit scoring titans. Attorney Walker Todd, who spent two decades in the legal sectors of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Cleveland, assures that for you to even begin to handle the systemic and structural troubles of the industry, a full-dress congressional hearing is order, ideally in three parts, as follows:

1) What do regulators do? Government regulators should declare under oath precisely how they conceive their unique role. (That would be fun to hear)

2) History of the profession. Focus on the way the goal and style of the profession have transformed from the past to the present. This could also address structural adjustments to the banking industry which have resulted in credit reporting chaos.

3) Testimony about misuses. Consumers would get to tell their tales about the misuses of credit scoring and reporting. There is plenty of evidence here. Credit reports have over 40 million mistakes on them every year, according to recent studies. Chances are this is getting worse as time goes on.

The purpose of the hearing should be to evaluate if current preparations and systems have improved the availability and condition of credit, deteriorated it, or left it approximately the same.




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