What could possibly go wrong here?

The unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is creating a massive mortgage database, along with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to the website JD Supra. We can thank Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the rest of the Destructive Party for this.

The mortgage database, which will date back to 1998, will be updated on a monthly basis and will include information such as the borrower’s financial and credit profile; the mortgage product and terms; the property purchased or refinanced; and the ongoing payment history of the loan. The database will create data sets on mortgages by matching informational files, such as property valuation models, to a nationwide sampling of credit bureau files on borrowers’ mortgages and payment histories. (Read More)

The PDF at the link indicates that the database isn’t supposed to include personal information of borrowers, but goes on to note that “observers have expressed concerns with the level of detailed borrower information that the agencies intend to collect and include in the database.” So, what would the detailed borrower information include?

In related news, George Will would like to see the CFPB dismantled by the courts, with good reason.

There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress’ constitutional role.

The CFPB’s director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama’s spurious recess appointments made when the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate’s power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB’s general lawlessness.

The CFPB nullifies Congress’ power to use the power of the purse to control bureaucracies because its funding — “determined by the director” — comes not from congressional appropriations but from the Federal Reserve. Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789, the CFPB is uniquely sovereign: The president appoints the director for a five-year term — he can stay indefinitely, if no successor is confirmed — and the director can be removed, but not for policy reasons.

One CFPB request for $94 million in Federal Reserve funds was made on a single sheet of paper. Its 2012 budget estimated $130 million for — this is the full explanation — “other services.” So it has been hiring promiscuously and paying its hires lavishly: As of three months ago, approximately 60 percent of its then 958 employees were making more than $100,000 a year. Five percent were making $200,000 or more. (A Cabinet secretary makes $199,700.)

The CFPB’s mission is to prevent practices it is empowered to “declare” are “unfair, deceptive, or abusive.” Law is supposed to give people due notice of what is proscribed or prescribed, and developed law does so concerning “unfair” and “deceptive” practices. Not so, “abusive.”

Read the whole thing.

The progressives caused the financial meltdown (with a lot of help from then-HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo) and then they came up with this unaccountable CFPB to prevent it from happening again? Good grief.

Update: More bad news on the CFPB:

My concerns about the Council were heightened by a report appearing earlier this week in the New York Times that the Obama campaign received research-based ideas about how to “get out the vote” from a group of behavioral scientists. According to the report, one of those scientists was Richard H. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago’s business school. (The report indicated that the Obama campaign would neither confirm or deny a relationship with the scientists.)

Professor Thaler is also one of the six professors appointed to the Academic Research Council and, as we have noted, behavioral economics are playing a central role in the CFPB’s regulatory and enforcement agenda. (Read More)

Update: Linked by Expose the Media – thanks!