Josh Gottheimer: “I want to thank the ranking member for his leadership. We work together quite often, and I know we disagree on this one.…”

“I want to thank the ranking member for his leadership. We work together quite often, and I know we disagree on this one. The challenge I have here is you have just a couple companies that control, through this black box, all this information that no one can figure out how they get your score and how the score is developed. It is completely arbitrary. People are working really hard to try to get their scores up so they can get a loan, so they can get a mortgage, and just to make their lives better. They work really hard at it. It just doesn't make any sense to me to have this arbitrary change in the number that no one can understand. Again, you just have a few people sitting in a room somewhere making this decision. The idea would be to make sure there is some sort of review, so that if a few people just go make this decision without any real competition--I am a pro-business Democrat--they go off and make this decision in this room somewhere, it really can affect every aspect of your life. Suddenly your credit goes down, and now they want to bring your credit down again, these credit scores down and change the number, with nothing to do with your own behavior at all. It is just that they decided this on externalities. So I agree with the ranking member that we should always make sure that we are circumspect here and we allow the markets to play out. But in this case, this isn't the market with competition.…”