Luetkemeyer

For the last several years it has been a regulatory onslaught for them, and part of it is banking regulation, which makes it difficult to get access to credit.

Small businesses are where you generate the jobs. And if we are not allowing those folks to be created, we are hurting ourselves.

Why, in the last 5 years, have there been almost no new bank charters issued? Why? What is your reasoning for that? Is it regulation? Or is it low interest rates?

If you don't have the tools, the ability to study this, how can you make regulations that pinpoint what you can do to improve the economy or know the effect of those rules?

This all goes back to monetary policy from the standpoint that rules and regulations are strangling our economy so that people can't participate in the economy.

This is amazing; this is frightening; and this is tragic.

Isn't that the definition of regulation by enforcement?

Congress has made Mr. Cordray a dictator.

the American people are, indeed, angry. And they have a right to be angry.

The concern that we have, though, is that there is a rubber stamp effect with FSOC with regards to insurance SIFIs.

I think that $15 billion line is one example of many, many places in Dodd-Frank where there was an attempt to restrict the impact of these new rules and regulations to larger banks.

I was in the banking business for 35 years and I, for the life of me, cannot understand how you could have an insurance company that is systematically important.

Please tell me we are not going to spend $8 million to build a fake White House?

If government employees acting without statutory authority can coerce banks into denying services to firms engaged in lawful behavior that the government doesn't like, where does it stop?

The Constitution dictates that the place to debate whether payday lending or any other lawful business should be allowed to operate and have access to the banking system is in the halls of Congress and the State legislatures.

ABA supports H.R. 4986, introduced by Representative Luetkemeyer, which directly solves the problem created by Operation Choke Point.

Operation Choke Point is fundamentally unfair to the banks and to the legal businesses that find their banking services cut off.

The DOJ should not be involved in bank regulation to any extent whatsoever.

We need to be regulating it to make sure that our consumers aren't being taken advantage of.

It is an interesting debate we are having here, the discussion this morning, from the standpoint that over the last 4 or 5 years, the American public has finally found out what actually goes on in banking and financial service institutions.

I do have some concerns in particular on the loan limits on the 7(a) program, which I believe will restrict the ability of some small and, ideally, medium-sized business to get the capital they need.

My bill will modernize title V of the Small Business Investment Act and significantly increase lending limits by CDCs.