Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra said if an attempt to invalidate his agency's funding is successful before the Supreme Court, it would add more uncertainty for the mortgage industry and create "a lot of headaches" for consumers, YahooFinance.com reported. “I think [on] the whole financial markets are much better off with the CFPB there,” Chopra told Yahoo Finance on Friday. "I think if a CFPB had existed in the early 2000s, we wouldn't have had a subprime mortgage crisis." The interview with Chopra was his first since the Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in a challenge to the funding structure of the CFPB, a financial regulator that was created by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the aftermath of the subprime housing meltdown and financial crisis in 2008. Payday lenders, who brought the challenge, have argued that the CFPB's funding that it receives through the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and that funding should be appropriated by Congress. The Supreme Court justices, however, appear likely to uphold that structure based on what transpired Tuesday, when some of them sounded skeptical of the arguments made by the payday lenders.
