Looking Forward by Looking Backward: The Future of Consumer Finance and Financial Protection
Abstract
This essay was prepared for “The Future of Financial Regulation Symposium” October 6, 2023, sponsored by the C. Boyden Gray Center. I assess the future of consumer finance and financial protection by looking to the lessons of history. Consumer finance and financial protection in the United States exhibits a spontaneous evolution driven by changes in technology and consumer preferences in a repeated cycle. In general, consumers use consumer finance in a manner consistent with the predictions of rational behavior in order to improve their lives. Consistently, this goal of consumer betterment runs up against paternalistic and repressive laws, which attempt to prevent the beneficial evolution of technology and competition. Eventually economic forces overwhelm regulatory repression for the betterment of consumers.
I track three distinct eras in the evolution of consumer finance and financial regulation that provide a roadmap to the future evolution in the virtual era and emergent threats to consumers from private and public sources, including the growing use of the consumer finance system to infringe on the exercise of constitutionally-protected values.