This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 16th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Richard Cordray is stepping down as head of the Controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Is this an opportunity to close the unorthodox agency that is relatively unaccountable

to either Congress or the President?

Perhaps it's merely an opportunity to restructure the agency and make it more accountable

to those elected branches of government.

Cato's Theabrook Knight comments.

What makes Richard Cordray so controversial?

The entire agency has been controversial since its inception.

I mean, it was part of Dodd-Frank.

This is an agency that was created in 2010 by Dodd-Frank, which is the big piece of financial legislation that was put in place after

the financial crisis.

And so it's been controversial since the beginning.

One of the things that has made Richard Cordray an exceptionally controversial director

of this agency is that he's taking a really antagonistic approach toward the financial services industry.

And that's a problem not just because everybody deserves fairness from the government,

even different industries, but also it doesn't promote the agency's mission in providing consumers

access to financial products.

I mean, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the name of the agency and if you take a view of

consumer protection that means that the financial services agency is somehow predatory toward people that

ignores the fact that most transactions the vast majority of

...