Melvin Watt: “my good friend Mr. Hensarling may be surprised to know that we actually agree very much with the spirit of what he is…”

“my good friend Mr. Hensarling may be surprised to know that we actually agree very much with the spirit of what he is trying to do. And I am not sure that my amendment will absolutely cure all of the concerns we have with it, but it will certainly make it better, and we will continue to work on trying to really address the issue. We don't want anybody to walk in and give false information on an application for a loan. One of the reasons we fought so hard to protect State laws and not to preempt all State laws is because that would be fraud and we think it would be outrageous, it would be shyster. But as everything, there is another side to this, and I will illustrate it with a loan that I just recently closed myself, a loan that was made to me. I submitted the application. I submitted the financial information. And what happened after that was that because the lender wanted their own form, they took my information that I had submitted to them and put it on their own form. They handed it back to me in a stack of forms that I needed to sign, and I signed them. Now, what has happened in the marketplace much, much more than the gentleman would like to know is that when that second block of papers came back, somebody had put false information on that application because they knew this borrower was not going to qualify for the loan if they didn't fudge the borrower's income, if they didn't fudge the borrower's credit in some way.”