Consumer-protection transparency rules fail because banks manipulate the very form of simplicity

Evidence

The naïve Elizabeth Warren–style reaction to this travesty is to enforce bureaucratic simplicity and transparency upon the lenders, perhaps combined with some “consumer education”; but this displays a distressing lack of understanding of the neoliberal mind-set. Banks and other vendors have generations of marketing savvy built into their understanding of the entrepreneurial self, a persona for whom they were instrumental in parturition. They are masters of sales pitches that seem “simple” but in fact are highly manipulative and empty of key information. The nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is only beginning to confront this fact, realizing that the dream of a transparent two-page standardized mortgage agreement is only marginally less prone to manipulation than the balloon-option ARM. If one is serious about countering modern bank practices, then tinkering with legal forms is utterly ineffectual: you have to be willing to muck in and manipulate the entrepreneurial self, as much as or more so than the banks. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the systemic critique that institutional fixes engineered within the paradigm cannot escape its assumptions; echoes Foucault’s observation that critique must work on the subject, not just the rules. — connects to: Consumer protection agencies that mimic bank analytics legitimize a model-driven financial order — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1977; Bank complexity disperses culpability for ignored fraud warnings; Bank executives reframed regulatory evasion and mass harm as mere innocent mistakes — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1593 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what would it actually mean operationally to ‘manipulate the entrepreneurial self’ against the banks, and has any policy attempted this since 2016?

Broader Connections

• Regulatory exemptions function as exploitable loopholes undermining enforcement #expands (0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1536
• Bank executives reframed regulatory evasion and mass harm as mere innocent mistakes #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1593
• Bank complexity disperses culpability for ignored fraud warnings #complicates (0.72)