July 16, 2010
Elizabeth Warren is the best person for Director of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Sign a letter to the President urging her nomination
Deadline for signatures COB Tuesday July 20
Dear Colleague,
Now that the Senate has passed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act conference report, and the President is poised to sign the bill into law, he will have to decide who to appoint as the first Director of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Please join me in sending a letter to President Obama supporting the appointment of Professor Elizabeth Warren for the job. Dr. Warren is the architect of the CFPB having described the contours of the agency even before the worst of the financial crisis. In a summer, 2007 article (http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6528) she laid out her vision for the agency, modeling it after the Consumer Product Safety Commission. She noted that consumers can’t buy a toaster that has a one in five chance of bursting into flames, but they can enter into a mortgage that has the same one in five chance of putting them out on the street.
Dr. Warren is the best person to be at the helm as the new Bureau gets up and running and I hope you will sign the letter below to President Obama supporting her nomination. If you have any questions or would like to sign the letter, please have your staff contact Kristin Richardson in my office at 202-225-7944 or Kristin.richardson@mail.house.gov.
Sincerely,
CAROLYN B. MALONEY
Member of Congress
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July 16, 2010
President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We are writing to ask that you nominate Dr. Elizabeth Warren as Director of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
A consumer financial protection body was Dr. Warren’s idea, first expressed in a journal article in 2007, and we can think of no better person to be its first Director. As a professor at Harvard Law School since 1982, she has risen to national prominence in the area of economics of the middle class. Even before the financial crisis, Professor Warren was warning of risky financial products and of lenders who “deliberately built tricks and traps into some credit products so they can ensnare families in a cycle of high-cost debt.” As Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel she has been an essential voice of reason in the wake of the financial crisis– and an ardent supporter of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
In her original conception, Dr. Warren modeled the Consumer Finance Protection body after the Consumer Product Safety Commission, describing the main functions of the agency “to establish guidelines for consumer disclosure, collect and report data about the uses of different financial products, review new financial products for safety, and require modification of dangerous products before they can be marketed to the public.” She foresaw the new Bureau as being able to evaluate these products to eliminate the gimmicks that made some far more dangerous than others.
At a time when the nation is still coping with the aftermath of a decade of a hands-off regulatory approach that brought the nation the worst financial crisis in three generations, with mortgage foreclosures still occurring at a rate of one million a year, with nearly one in five Americans either unemployed, under-employed, or who have given up looking for work altogether (while still trying to cope with a mountain of consumer debt), we need a CFPB Director who truly understands the burden that American families are coping with today, and the mission of this new body.
Dr. Warren is simply the perfect choice for that post. We hope you will act quickly to appoint her as its Director.
Sincerely,
[Name]