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Warren blasts CFPB director Vought for undermining Trump credit card affordability

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Sen. Warren on Trump phone call, credit card rate cap and tackling affordability

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Kevin Mohatt | Kevin Lamarque | | Reuters

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday accused the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of undermining President Donald Trump‘s stated push to make credit cards more affordable, according to a letter obtained exclusively by CNBC.

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In a letter to acting CFPB Director Russell Vought, Warren, D-Mass., noted that in the last year the agency has dropped a rule limiting credit card late fees, sided with lenders in lawsuits over deceptive practices and paused enforcement actions against the industry.

Earlier this month, Trump demanded in a social media post that U.S. banks voluntarily cap credit card interest rates at 10% for a year. When they didn’t, Trump this week called on lawmakers to pass legislation on the issue.

“I spoke with President Trump last week and told him that Congress could pass legislation to cap credit card rates, if he would fight for it,” Warren wrote in her letter to Vought.

“While Congress considers legislation to address the issue, your own actions are directly undermining the President’s stated goals,” she wrote. “Under your leadership, the CPFB has taken steps to make it easier—not harder—for big banks and credit card companies to rip off Americans.”

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The letter from Warren seizes on Trump’s pivot to affordability and seeks to leverage his initiative against his own administration, escalating tensions over the financial regulatory agency that she helped to create under the Obama administration. Members of the Trump administration have sought to shutter the CFPB as part of a broader pro-business deregulatory agenda.

Current and former CFPB employees have said the agency is on life support under Vought, who has fought in court to enact mass layoffs and stop the agency’s funding.

An agency spokesperson said that the CFPB was disallowed from limiting credit card rates by the Dodd Frank Act.

Vought should be “using the full scope of [the CFPB’s] authorities to address excessive credit card costs and to crack down on bad actors,” instead of trying to dismantle the agency, Warren wrote.

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She directed Vought to “immediately reinstate its rule capping credit card late fees at $8, which would save Americans more than $10 billion annually,” Warren said.

She contended Vought should also tamp down on deceptive practices around the industry’s deferred interest promotions, resume enforcement of rules around monitoring interest rate increases, respond to a mounting pile of consumer complaints, and halt bait-and-switch tactics with rewards programs.

“Either President Trump is not serious about making credit cards more affordable or you are insubordinately disregarding his direction,” she wrote.

Sen. Warren on Trump phone call, credit card rate cap and tackling affordability

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Crypto World

SEC Approves Nasdaq Tokenization Trading Trial

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Nasdaq, SEC, Tokenization

Nasdaq has been given the regulatory green light to offer some tokenized stocks, which will trade alongside traditional securities on its exchange.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday approved Nasdaq’s pilot proposal to support the trading of tokenized versions of stocks and other securities.

Nasdaq first filed its proposal in September that sought to allow trades on high-volume stocks in either a traditional or tokenized form on the same exchange in a pilot with the key market infrastructure firm, Depository Trust Company.

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The tokenized stocks would trade alongside their traditional counterparts on the same order book, at the same price, with the same ticker and identifying number and carry the same rights.

Tokenization, where an asset is represented on a blockchain, has seen a recent boom as major financial firms have tested the technology to shrink settlement times and experiment with longer trading hours.

Eligible participants can trade top tokenized stocks

According to the SEC’s approval filing, only “eligible participants” are to take part in the tokenization pilot and can choose whether to trade a traditional or tokenized stock.

The options for tokenized stock are limited to securities that trade in the Russell 1000 Index, which tracks the 1,000 largest publicly-traded companies in the US by market capitalization, along with exchange-traded funds tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indices.

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Nasdaq, SEC, Tokenization
An excerpt of some of the key similarities between tokenized and traditional stocks under the Nasdaq’s pilot. Source: SEC

The SEC noted the Nasdaq’s proposal received feedback with concerns around market surveillance and diverging prices, which it said was later allayed by an amendment laying out more details.

Related: SEC’s ‘Crypto Mom’ calls for simpler disclosure rules, flags tokenization debate

The approval comes after the Nasdaq announced earlier this month that it had partnered with crypto exchange Kraken to allow its clients to move securities from its infrastructure to tokenized versions that can be used on blockchains and to allow public companies to create and issue their own tokenized shares.

New York Stock Exchange owner the Intercontinental Exchange has also set its sights on tokenization, and invested in crypto exchange OKX in early March to launch tokenized stocks.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins said on Tuesday that the agency would soon be seeking public comment on a range of crypto-related exemptions, including a “fundraising exemption” to allow some securities involving crypto to raise a set amount in any 12-month period while being exempted from registering under securities laws.

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Magazine: Can Robinhood or Kraken’s tokenized stocks ever be truly decentralized?