Initial approval was granted in Colorado regarding a disputed rule from last year’s payday lending legislation. In a debate that touched on lost jobs and shuttered stores from last year’s bill, the Denver Post provided this headline:

House give initial OK to bigger profits for payday lenders

From a usual suspect, The Huffington Post:

With regard to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), this apparently now implies that Mr. Bachus will use any means possible to change the topic away from substance – how banks treat their customers – to imagined procedural issues.

Specifically, Mr. Bachus is wrongly accusing Elizabeth Warren of misleading Congress with regard to the role of the CFPB in the negotiations over how to settle allegations that mortgage foreclosure practices have been abusive (see also this news coverage).

Mother Jones pushes back against Republican critics:

Republicans in Congress love to attack Elizabeth Warren, the White House aide overseeing the start-up of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). At a March 16 hearing, House GOPers used Warren as a “punching bag,” as one columnist put it, questioning her authority as the CFPB’s for-the-time-being leader and predicting the bureau’s imminent demise. None of those criticisms, however, compares to the pathetic accusation leveled by Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) in a letter (PDF) sent to Warren on Wednesday.

More coverage of Warren’s speech:

“The lesson seems clear: Rules should be focused, and those that are not useful should be revised or eliminated,” she said, adding that the bureau would not primarily focus on writing new regulations. Ms. Warren said she even agreed with the chamber’s recent proclamation that the bureau should work to “prevent duplicative and inconsistent regulation of Main Street business.”

The Hill newspaper has the recap:

Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), mounted a spirited defense Wednesday for keeping the agency’s budget free of the Congressional appropriations process.

House Republicans are backing legislation that would bring the CFPB’s funding within Congress’s control, but Warren said in a speech to the US Chamber of Commerce that there is no “principled reason” for doing so.

“Not one other banking regulator — not one — is subject to appropriations,” she said at a capital markets summit hosted by the chamber. “Requiring the CFPB to go into every examination against a trillion-dollar company knowing that the company could turn its lobbying force against the agency’s funding is not a prescription for fair and evenhanded enforcement.”

Read about the House Financial Services Committee Chairman’s latest effort to reform Dodd-Frank: 

A key House GOP lawmaker on Wednesday expressed concern about how a new consumer financial protection bureau is being set up with one director in charge rather than a bipartisan five-person commission as he would have preferred. “It has nothing to do with any particular individual.

 Journalists have attacked payday lending companies for everything now. This Texas columnist seems to think that a company’s diversification into new markets signals that regulatory bans don’t impact the industry.

In its annual 10-K filing, the company noted that Colorado, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arizona, Montana and Maryland had adopted tighter restrictions on payday loans. In three of the states, rules were so stringent that Cash America had stopped offering the loans there.

Yet none of this had a material effect on the company, its consolidated revenue or its operations in 2010, the filing said. That’s because Cash America developed new products and grew loan volume in other markets, including abroad.

How is this any different than newspapers diversifying into online and mult-media platforms after the explosion of new technology?

Sorry I didn’t put this link up before Warren spoke at 9:00, but there are interesting speakers throughout the day at this event that is focused on financial reform.

Regarding yesterday’s post about debt collection complaints:

Now let’s take this another step and clarify the difference between legal, licensed collectors and and off-shore/illegal collectors that scoff at the FDCPA. Just like the PDL industry, all of the real collectors get lumped in with the crooks out there!

Washington Post has a picture book of all the major players.