Political Quotes

“Mr. President, both sides agree that everyone benefits from a marketplace free of fraud and other deceptive and exploitative practices. The disagreement is over the best way to structure our Federal regulatory agencies to accomplish this goal and provide accountability. One of the lessons of the financial crisis is that we need a supervisory program that looks and considers how safety and soundness and consumer protection work together and reinforce better and safer services to banking customers. Far too often, supervision either looked at consumer issues in isolation--promoting access to credit and home ownership--or it looked at safety and soundness in isolation, such as ensuring that customer information was legally accurate but not asking whether it was understandable to bank customers. We should have strengthened the link and coordination between prudential supervision and consumer protections rather than severing it. Instead Congress institutionalized this separation by creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and blurred the role and accountability of the prudential regulators and the new Bureau. Mortgage underwriting is a good example of an issue that was found lacking before the financial crisis and has the potential to be subject to an even more bureaucratic regulatory system going forward.…”