Business
Opinion: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has irked billionaires, but it serves the public well
The billionaire Elon Musk and the California venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have started a debate about the role of government that we should be having — but it might not go the way they would hope. They don’t like government agencies that stop corporations like theirs from ripping off consumers.
They especially hate the 14-year-old Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But most voters in both major parties support its work.
Musk and Andreessen recently made their case publicly. “Delete CFPB,” was Musk’s pithy policy position on X. Andreessen spun a conspiratorial tale on “The Joe Rogan Show” about how Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) uses the bureau to take away the bank accounts — “debank” — of anyone who doesn’t agree with her, especially Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Attacks by the two men resemble what Wall Street banks and predatory lenders have said since before the bureau came into existence in 2010. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon tried to strangle it in the crib during the congressional debate over its creation and now audaciously paints his $4-trillion, very profitable bank as a victim of regulation. Payday lenders took a case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to defund the agency (they lost). Most financial institutions belong to lobby groups that have sought to eviscerate the bureau.
These industries dislike the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau intensely because, bluntly, it does its job. Congress gave the bureau enforcement powers to stand up for consumers, and companies run or influenced by Musk and Andreessen have been on the receiving end. In one example from 2016, the agency sued a startup backed by Andreessen, Oakland-based LendUp, after it flouted federal law. Ultimately the bureau shut the company down in 2021 following repeated violations that included changing the terms of existing loans.
Andreessen is also an investor in San Francisco-based Synapse, a bank-like company that wiped out people’s life savings, as reported last month. No charges have been filed — yet.
PayPal, with which Musk was closely involved, has also faced sanction by the bureau.
Tech moguls might hold a grudge when justice is done, but the 118,101 LendUp customers who received more than $40 million of their money back thanks to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau surely feel differently. Those people are not alone.
Since its creation, the agency has recovered more than $21 billion in restitution and canceled debts for tens of millions of consumers. Recently, in just one week, the bureau returned $1.8 billion to 4 million consumers who had been scammed by a group of credit repair companies scattered across the western United States. Bureau-created protections barring unfair fees, charges and terms for financial products have saved billions more.
So yes, Andreessen might have felt a little salty after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shuttered LendUp. And yes, companies that defraud clients are justifiably more likely to be shut down or “debanked,” if Andreessen wants to use that term. But the bureau also stands up for consumers who actually are debanked, like people who are suddenly cut off from their accounts because of race or ethnicity.
Not every case involves, as with “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler, a call to the cops for banking while Black. The bureau works the much more insidious cases, like when companies systematically close accounts for discriminatory reasons, with no outward evidence of misdeeds. In fact, after the agency received numerous complaints about account closures and freezes, it created a rule — which will go into effect soon — to oversee digital payment apps and stop illegal debanking.
Indeed, the bureau’s director, Rohit Chopra, has explicitly called for a banking system that does not penalize identity or speech. On the podcast Organized Money, Chopra recently said: “We have to do more to stop debanking and make sure that people really have a right for all of their law-abiding activities to freely flow through the banking system.”
Musk’s attack on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau hinges on his new role as one of President-elect Donald Trump’s go-to guys for shrinking government. In theory, that agenda appeals to an anti-bureaucratic, libertarian strain in American politics — a sentiment that has ebbed considerably since its high point in the Reagan years, given what Americans have learned from the savings-and-loan debacle, the predatory practices of credit card companies, payday lenders, and of course, the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. Voters like government agencies that work well and work for them. There’s a reason proposals to change Social Security are known as the third rail of American politics; the public relies on this program just as we rely on consumer protection rules.
My organization has researched what voters think of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mission and found support among Republicans, independents and Democrats. Standing up to Wall Street and predatory lenders and wrangling back ill-gotten gains on behalf of the little people is very popular. Other surveys confirm this finding.
In the coming months and years, the new president, his appointees and congressional Republicans are likely to try to kneecap a government institution that has done remarkable things for millions of families.
Musk and Andreessen are the leading edge of a false populism that hides an agenda that will unfold over the next four years designed to benefit the wealthy at everyone else’s expense. They can launch a campaign against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but they can’t change the facts or draw the battle lines: On one side are a handful of Wall Street bankers, payday lenders and Silicon Valley billionaires, who make money by breaking the rules. On the other side are the vast majority of Americans, who benefit from and value the bureau’s crucial work — but don’t have a billionaire’s megaphone.
Christine Chen Zinner is senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform.
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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