Ed Royce: “Yesterday a small community banker in Ohio by the name of Sarah Wallace wrote a letter. She wrote about what she…”

“Yesterday a small community banker in Ohio by the name of Sarah Wallace wrote a letter. She wrote about what she believed will be the end of community banking as we know it. And Sarah Wallace notes, in her words: ``Going forward, we will no longer be able to evaluate loan applications based solely on the creditworthiness of the borrower. We will be making regulation compliance decisions instead of credit decisions.'' And this gets to the heart of the issue with the underlying legislation that we're discussing. Despite the fact that every failed financial firm had some type of Federal regulator overseeing it, the answer put forward in this bill is to give broad, largely undefined powers to those regulators and not, by the way, in the interest of safety and soundness. If the objective was safety and soundness, the amendment that I put forward to allow the safety and soundness regulator to overrule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in cases where safety and soundness was at stake, that would have been upheld. No, that's not the goal here. And to get back to the point that Sarah Wallace makes, her observation is that instead of focusing on providing credit and providing the best possible service to the customers in these small towns that need that credit, these institutions will instead focus their efforts on appeasing the Federal Government and on appeasing their allies in Congress.”