Barely two days after Russell Vought, the new acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ordered the agency to close its office and halt all its work, employees spent Monday in a state of deep confusion about what they should — or should not — be doing. Mr. Vought, the recently confirmed director of…
The day before Linda Wetzel closed on her retirement home in Southport, N.C., in 2012 — a cozy place where she could open the windows at night and catch an ocean breeze — the bank making the loan surprised her with a fee she hadn’t expected. Ms. Wetzel scoured her mortgage paperwork and couldn’t find…
Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were instructed to cease “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” effectively stopping the agency’s operations, in an email from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, on Saturday evening. Mr. Vought, who was confirmed this week to lead the Office of…
The median American household has a combined balance of $10,000 in its checking and savings accounts, according to a census estimate. For the last few years, anyone keeping this amount in a high-yield savings account has earned close to 4 percent annual interest, or about $400 a year. But the average savings account interest rate…
The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, was fired on Saturday, prematurely ending a five-year term that was scheduled to run through late 2026. “With so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, agencies like the C.F.P.B. have never been more critical,” Mr. Chopra wrote in a letter he posted…
Amid the global turmoil of this young new year comes a flurry of welcome developments that will help many people — especially retirees and those close to retirement — supercharge their savings, cut prescription drug costs, keep more of the money they earn and, possibly, raise their credit scores. Fair warning, though: It’s complicated. The…
A federal regulator sued a mortgage finance firm owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate on Monday, claiming it made loans to buyers of manufactured homes that it knew they could not afford. The civil suit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Tennessee by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said Vanderbilt Mortgage…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent agency of the US government, sued Walmart and the workforce payments company Branch Messenger on Monday for allegedly forcing delivery drivers to use specific bank accounts, costing them more than $10 million in junk fees and misleading them about payment access. The lawsuit focuses on Walmart’s Spark…