As you may know, Capital One recently applied to regulators to acquire ING Direct. The deal would create the fifth-largest bank in the country and raises substantial concerns about how the deal would impact communities.

One of the exciting aspects of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which opened its doors on July 21, is that we finally have a federal regulator for non-bank financial institutions, like independent mortgage lenders and payday lenders. But the CFPB will not have the authority the regulate other non-bank financial institutions, like consumer finance companies, debt settlement companies or prepaid card providers unless it finds that they are larger participants in the market. It’s heartening to see that one of the CFPB’s first orders of business is to define the scope of non-bank financial institutions it will regulate so it can get to work protecting consumers regardless of where they conduct their financial business.

The CFPB is soliciting a third round of comments on its Know Before You Owe project to simplify disclosure forms used in the mortgage process.  The agency last week extended the deadline to this Wednesday.

I tend to be a “glass half full” optimist, so I’m pretty happy about the launch of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on July 21. Having a regulator that looks out for the interests of consumers is definitely something to celebrate.

We’ve been pushing for stronger protections on overdraft protection loans for years, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a federal bank regulator, recently released a proposed guidance that would eliminate some of the worst features of overdraft programs-such as ordering transactions to maximize fee income.  However, the proposed rule has a glaring flaw—it puts  bank-based payday loans, also known as deposit advance loans, in the same category as overdraft loans. Bank payday loans and overdraft loans are entirely different beasts—they’re structured differently, used for different purposes, and have different risks. The two products need regulations tailored to their unique characteristics. We recently submitted our comments on these rules; you can send regulators your thoughts until August 8, 2011.

When it takes a long time to create a problem, it often takes even longer to fix it. In Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro illustrated how various American tax, property and financial policies and practices precluded generations of African Americans from building wealth and created intergenerational poverty, the effects of which continue to reverberate today. The gains that some African Americans and other people of color made in wealth creation through home ownership, small business development and educational attainment during the late 1990s and early 2000s were all but wiped out by ongoing the financial and foreclosure crisis. If left unaddressed, the racial wealth gap will continue to grow.