Bankrate, How predatory but legal auto loans are systematically taking advantage of people with subprime credit

“With a made-to-starve Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), increased auto loan regulation is unlikely to arrive anytime soon. As much as you might assign this fact to political turnover in Washington, D.C., it’s really years in the making, since the Great Recession of 2008.

‘The dealers are a very powerful lobbying force in Congress,’ says NACA’s Hines.

In fact, Hines adds, those forces — including the National Automobile Dealers Association and the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association (NIADA), which didn’t reply to Bankrate’s interview requests before publishing — convinced Congress that auto dealers should be exempt from CFPB oversight. The CFPB had a record of enforcement actions against certain types of auto lenders until the second Trump Administration. And about 15 years after the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB, its new leadership has suggested it shouldn’t be charged with supervising auto lenders, either.”