Elizabeth Warren: Harvard law professor-turned-super regulator

A source close to the banking industry told TheDC his own fears went deeper than that. According to him, authority that was given to the CFPB and its director is unprecedented. He even went so far as to question Warren’s credentials.

“People give credit to Elizabeth Warren [for the idea of the CFPB], but I’m not sure if that’s right,” he said. “The idea predates legislation that came out of the White House. People don’t really understand the genesis of the agency.”

According to Anthony Randazzo, the director of economic research at the Reason Foundation, “Elizabeth Warren has been the longest visible advocate for consumer financial protection ‘reform,’ but it’s partly because of people like Warren that there is confusion for consumers in the first place.”

That point was raised by numerous financial experts who said that the problem with having strong consumer advocacy is that is shifts the weight of responsibility away from consumers. In the end, that promotes a culture where the public doesn’t have the incentive to pay attention to banking rules or the consequences of missing a credit card payment.

But even Warren’s academic laurels which much of her reputation rests on have come in to question. Indeed, for all her scholarly credentials, said Randazzo, “she has been debunked a lot.”

“Try and find a 30-page checking account guide like she claims, the longest you’d find is probably 13 pages,” said Randazzo, referring to a 2007 essay Warren wrote about complex credit card contracts. In it, she claimed that “30 pages of incomprehensible text” were designed to confuse the consumer.

One such Warren “debunker” is Megan McArdle, the economics and business editor at the Atlantic magazine. In numerous blog posts, McArdle has challenged the academic work Warren has been so highly praised for throughout her career.

In a post dated June 4, 2009, McArdle took on what was then a very recent report published by Warren and two other colleagues that argued that high medical costs had become the biggest reason for bankruptcy filings:

Yet upon closer examination, it turns out that it is not just wrong, but actively, aggressively wrong. Warren and her co-authors have obscured important and obvious facts that call the integrity of the work into serious question.

According to McArdle, what Warren purposely obscured is the fact that between 2001 and 2007, bankruptcy filings decreased dramatically — a fact that essentially invalidates the report. In another post published just last week, McArdle accused Warren of skewing her studies to reinforce already held beliefs by the left.

“Her work gets so much attention because it comes from a Harvard professor,” McArdle wrote. “And this isn’t Harvard caliber material — not even Harvard undergraduate.”

That may sound harsh, but as McArdle points out, if Warren obscures inconvenient facts in her studies, what else is she hiding from the public? It’s an important question for someone who could have an enormous impact in shaping the financial and consumer landscape in the coming years.