Consumer Confidential: Why is Trump's consumer protection agency helping to promote H&R Block's credit card?

The process by which government regulators getting cozy with the businesses they're supposed to regulate is a time-worn and familiar problem. There's even a name for it - "regulatory capture."

But no government agency in our new gilded age seems to be plunging into this dishonorable relationship as gleefully as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau, it should be remembered, began as the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and was created as part of the financial reforms that followed the crash of 2008 and the recession that followed. The idea was to ride herd on a financial industry that thought nothing of ripping off consumers. That was how the CFPB functioned during the Obama administration.

In the Trump administration the bureau seems more intent on helping financial firms pick consumers' pockets. The latest case in point emerged Wednesday, when its director, Kathy Kraninger, told a conference of financial executives and lobbyists about a joint study the CFPB has completed with H&R Block,