FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 13, 2011

CONTACT: John Carey at 202-466-1854
john@ourfinancialsecurity.org

AFR Statement on Mark-ups of H.R.1315, H.R. 1121, and H.R. 1667

Washington, DC – Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of more than 250 national and state organizations working together for strong Wall Street reform issued the following statement today:

Lisa Donner, Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform:

“The bills marked up by the House Financial Services Committee would weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and are wrong for consumers and for the economy.  If enacted, these bills would virtually guarantee that the CFPB would be a weak and timid agency without the will or ability to stand up for the public and curb the kind of financial abuses that caused the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The American public supports Wall Street Reform and the CFPB, but Wall Street, finance industry special interests, and their supporters in Congress apparently want to preserve a status quo that cost Americans millions of jobs, billions in taxpayer funded bailouts, and trillions of dollars in pensions, home values, and retirement savings.

These bills disregard and deny the regulatory failures that led to the current financial crisis. They also ignore the limits on CFPB powers that already exist in the Dodd-Frank Act.

H.R. 1315 (Duffy) would grant the same regulators who failed so spectacularly to protect consumers and stop the financial crisis broad leeway to block CFPB rules. It is a clear lesson of the financial crisis that strong consumer protections would have reduced, rather than increased, systemic financial risk.

H.R. 1121 (Bachus) would make the CFPB less accountable and more likely to slide into gridlock and inaction, by altering the leadership of the agency from that of a single director to a five-member commission. The fractured and unaccountable nature of the current regulatory system allowed consumer protection to fall through the cracks and regulators to blame each other for inaction. That is why Congress consolidated authority within a single agency fully accountable to the President, Congress, the judiciary and the American people.

H.R.1667 (Capito) would postpone the date for the transfer of consumer functions to the CFPB (July 21) if the CFPB does not yet have a director in place.  There is no good reason to delay the consumer protection we need any further.”

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