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Frank Hails ‘Major Breakthrough’ in Financial Regulation

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On Thursday, the House Financial Services Committee voted in favor of a bill aimed at creating the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a watchdog organization designed in response to President Barack Obama’s call for greater oversight and regulation of banks and other financial companies in light of the past year’s economic implosion. Two big supporters of the agency on Capitol Hill, Rep. Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren, chair of the bailout watchdog panel, sure are pleased, even if—or, rather, especially because—the banks aren’t. —KA

Reuters via Google News:

“The Consumer Financial Protection Agency will prevent predatory lending practices and other abuses and will ensure that consumers get clear information they can understand about financial products like credit cards and mortgages,” Obama said in a statement welcoming the committee’s vote.

Committee Chairman Barney Frank, who is steering reform in the House, called the panel vote a “major breakthrough.”

U.S. businesses and financial services firms lobbied fiercely to kill the bill, arguing that such an agency would impose onerous and duplicative rules as well as crimp innovation.

The bill backed by the panel trimmed back the Obama proposal, exempting many auto dealers, as well as credit, mortgage and title insurers, from CFPA oversight.

But Elizabeth Warren, the top watchdog for the government’s $700 billion bailout program and early advocate of the consumer agency, voiced delight the powerful banking lobby was unable to knock down the wider plan.

“When I first came to Washington with the idea of this agency, everyone told me ‘the banks always win, quit now because the banks always win.’ They didn’t win today,” Warren told reporters.

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TAGS: barney frank cfpa consumer credit card elizabeth warren house financial services committee interest rates watchdog agency

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By Fewkes, October 24 at 12:16 am #

I read an article about an attempt by a member of Frank’s committee to slip in an
amendment to allow the banks to pick their own regulators. The amendment
process seems like a popular Congressional legislative trick to gut a bill and still
make it look like they have come to the rescue of the public. They avoid
responsibility for their vote by having a voice vote which is not recorded. This
allows them to work behind the scenes and not be held accountable.

The Rules Committee should require that all votes be recorded so that we can see
what Congress does and for whom it is working.

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By malakyah, October 23 at 10:01 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

The Entire World knows its Israel looting America ,why are we so blind?

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By Diogenes, October 23 at 7:52 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

As I understand, there was a set of laws & regulations that has been eliminated during Clinton’s reign. JUST RESTORE THEM!!!
Citizen’s watchdog bodies do not and will never have the power to enforce and punish.

****************************************
All this is a red herring for the masses, scattered abundently by “LawMakers” who actually do not wish to restore the good old regulations which were created after the 1929 financial crisis in order to prevent such a crisis.
*****************************************

The laws are already written, since they were enacted in the past. Nothing ‘heavy’ and time consuming is not needed; just remove the dust from the old books of regulation and issue an executive order to make them a LAW again.

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By Ed Harges, October 22 at 11:25 pm #

Well, hallelujah, and I mean that. This is very good news on the legislative front.

And there’s more good news. The judicial branch of our government is also fighting back against
the Wall Street thieves. Increasingly, judges around the country are declaring foreclosures illegal.
This promises to snowball very quickly into a huge avalanche.

It seems that the geniuses who came up with these nifty methods of transferring questionable
mortgages to other people through the magic of “securitization” neglected to take into account that
there are very specific legal requirements which must be satisfied before anyone can take
possession of a mortgage or a house, and these requirements were simply ignored, on what
appears to be a massive scale. And now, judges who have taken the time to study these
complicated deals and match them up against the laws which are supposed to govern such
transactions are telling these financial institutions, “We’ve done the reading, and it’s clear: you
simply have no legal standing. You have no claim to these houses. Say good-bye to your imaginary
real estate holdings.”

This is Wall Street’s newest crisis. Zillions of dollars of wealth which these fat cats thought they
possessed is evaporating in the courts of law.

Heh-heh.

Read:

“New Shockwaves From Courts and Accounting Board: The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street, as
Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures”

By PAM MARTENS

http://counterpunch.org/martens10212009.html

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