Matt Levine, Columnist

Absent Regulators and Activist Votes

Also art valuation, Venezuela CDS, oil stocks and smart contracts via crypto.

November 17, 2017 at 2:40 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Consumer finance.

Richard Cordray, the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that is much disliked by Republicans, is resigning, and yesterday I joked that he is "presumably to be replaced by an ashtray or a block of wood or Eric Trump." That was a joke! Really I assumed the Trump administration would replace Cordray with someone who, sure, was not committed to protecting consumers financially or anything, but who was at least willing to go sit in the office most days. But the administration has wildly surpassed my expectations, and Cordray's replacement might be a person who not only hates the CFPB but who also has a demanding full-time government job and so will not actually do the CFPB one: