South Dakota Independent Bankers echo the call for Congress to fix the out-of-control CFPB

I’ve written on the topic over the course of the last year or so, and highlighted it again this past week, when I noticed that yesterday, South Dakota’s Independent Community Bankers through their president and CEO, Greg McCurry, brought up the subject again; how Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Finance Protection Board actually hurts consumers by limiting the availability of credit instead of protecting them:

Community bankers know all too well the negative effect of the CFPB on local lending. The bureau has issued a bevy of one-size-fits-all regulations that fail to adequately distinguish between Main Street community banks and the Wall Street megabanks that policymakers intended to rein in after the crisis. These onerous rules have restricted mortgage lending at nearly three-quarters of community banks and replaced customized, relationship-based loans with cookie-cutter bureaucratic standards – none of which serves consumers.

Meanwhile, the rising regulatory workload has exacerbated consolidation in the community banking industry, which has declined from more than 8,000 in 2010 to less than 5,900 today, leaving fewer communities with access to responsible financial services providers.

The CFPB’s complex regulatory framework poses a tangible threat to the local communities that depend on community banks, which carry a disproportionate burden of any regulation because of their smaller size. Fortunately, reforming the CFPB is not as complex as the regulations it issues.

Read it here.

In my professional career, I’ve worked for a bank, which worked to keep branches open in a number of small-town South Dakota communities. What people need to realize is that along with schools, the short list on what contributes to communities dying is the ability to conduct banking.

When South Dakota small towns lose their community banks, it should be a tremendous concern. And our delegation in Washington can help reverse the trend by cutting the government red-tape that contribute towards killing these businesses, and by stopping the CFPB’s overregulation.