[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 197 (Monday, December 4, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7821-S7823]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                S. 2155

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for recognizing 
me.
  Last week, the Senate gave tax handouts to millionaires, 
billionaires, and multinational corporations that ship jobs overseas, 
and the middle class got almost nothing. This week, it is the banks' 
turn, and just like last week, working people get ignored again.
  The bill the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee 
will take up tomorrow, S. 2155, puts taxpayers at risk of another bank 
bailout and puts homeowners at risk of the same traps that led to the 
foreclosure crisis, all while, again, doing virtually nothing for hard-
working Americans.
  While Congress has been preoccupied doing the bidding of special 
interest lobbyists, American families started getting notices in the 
mail that their Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, health 
insurance will be yanked away. There are 209,000 children in my State, 
the sons and daughters of low-income workers making 8, 10, or $12 an 
hour and who don't have insurance. Having started bipartisan and having 
always been enacted and renewed in a bipartisan manner over the last 20 
years, the CHIP program will be yanked away. Virginia will be next, 
then Ohio, and then other States where parents will go to their mailbox 
and open up a letter from the government saying: Sorry, your children's 
health insurance is gone.
  The Senate is doing nothing to stop it. Instead this body, made up of 
Senators who have insurance paid for by taxpayers, devotes its energy 
to helping banks of all sizes that are making record profits. In the 
third quarter of this year, the five largest U.S. banks--just the five 
largest U.S. banks--raked in a combined $21 billion in profits. In the 
third quarter only, the five banks have $21 billion in profits. In 
fact, profits at the five biggest banks are even higher than they were 
before the crisis. Meanwhile working Americans haven't gotten a raise 
in 16 years.
  I sat at my high school reunion in Mansfield, OH, about a year ago, 
with a woman who has been a teller at a large bank for 30 years. Her 
income, after 30 years at this bank, is $30,000 a year. She is working 
for one of those largest five banks. Yet those banks, as I said, have 
$21 billion in profits in the third quarter.
  Forty-four million Americans are saddled with student loan debt. 
Communities are littered with abandoned homes and hollowed-out 
factories. Yet this bill has no help for Americans burdened with 
student loan debt, no help for homeowners still underwater, and no help 
for workers who haven't had a raise in years.
  Congress, especially the Banking Committee, have a collective amnesia 
about the financial crisis. It is like it didn't even happen 10 years 
ago. They have a collective amnesia about the housing crisis and the 
devastation it brought to families across the country. We know how many 
people lost jobs 10 years ago because of Wall Street's overreach. We 
know how many people lost their savings. We know how many people lost 
their homes. Families in Ohio don't have the luxury of this collective 
amnesia. Families don't have the luxury in my neighborhood of 
forgetting what happened 10 years ago because so many of them are still 
digging out.
  We passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation to protect 
those families and make sure a crisis like we saw 9 years doesn't 
happen again. Stress tests were put in place to ensure that banks could 
weather the next downturn without putting the economy at risk. 
According to the President's designee to be Chair of the Federal 
Reserve and according to so many others who understand these issues and 
understand banking, stress tests are one of the most effective tools we 
have to prevent taxpayers from being asked once again to bail out the 
banks.
  This bill weakens stress tests for all large banks, which together 
took $239 billion--that is $239,000 million--in taxpayer bailouts last 
time. They are banks like JPMorgan Chase and other Wall Street 
megabanks that are designated as global systemically important banks--
we call them G-SIBs around here--which means their collapse could cause 
harm that ripples throughout the world. It is not just the damage it 
does to Main Street in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Cleveland, or Toledo, but 
it would do damage to the economy all over the world. Without rigorous, 
annual stress tests, taxpayers could once again be on the hook if those 
too-big-to-fail banks collapse and we don't have the right tools in 
place to see it coming.
  So I ask my fellow Senators: Are you willing to go back to your 
homes, are you willing to go back to your States and tell taxpayers you 
work for that you are willing to gamble another $240 billion of their 
money on a bill like this? For some other large banks, those stress 
tests could be even easier under this bill. Make no mistake, these 
aren't small banks we are talking about, and I am not talking about the 
largest 10 banks. I am talking about the banks in more detail affected 
by this bill. Together these banks--about 30 of them--hold $4 trillion 
in combined assets. That is $4,000 billion in combined assets. That is 
more than one-quarter of all assets across the entire banking industry. 
Would you trust your family's health to a doctor who only passed a 
dumbed-down version of their board exams? Why would we trust the health 
of our economy to banks that only passed diluted weakened stress tests?
  This bill doesn't stop at stress tests. It allows these same large 
banks to

[[Page S7822]]

borrow more money than they can afford by weakening capital 
requirements. It exempts dozens of the largest banks from making plans 
called living wills. These are plans that make sure that if a bank 
fails, taxpayers will not be paying the bills once again.
  It weakens oversight of foreign megabanks operating in the United 
States, the same banks that have repeatedly violated U.S. laws. Let's 
run through a few of their rap sheets. Santander, I believe, is a 
Spanish bank. It illegally repossessed cars from members of our 
military. It repossessed cars from our servicemen and servicewomen who 
were serving our country overseas. Are we giving them a break? Are we 
going to deregulate them?
  Deutsche Bank manipulated the benchmark interest rates used to set 
borrowers' mortgages. Barclays manipulated electric energy prices in 
the western United States. Credit Suisse illegally did business with 
Iran. UBS sold toxic mortgage-backed securities. So are we going to 
give these banks a break? They have repeatedly violated U.S. law. Are 
these the banks we want to help?
  The bill also puts American homeowners at risk of the same sorts of 
mortgage abuses that brought us to foreclosure crisis. My wife and I 
live in Cleveland, OH, in ZIP Code 44105. In the first half of 2007, my 
ZIP Code had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States 
of America. It is pretty hard for most of us to imagine here what it 
might be like to be kicked out of our homes. I ask my colleagues to try 
for a minute to put yourselves in the shoes of one of these families. 
Pope Francis exhorted his parish priests to go out and smell like the 
flock--go out and listen to people, see the kinds of lives, ask them 
questions about the kinds of lives they live.
  So what happens when a family is thrown out of its house? Before you 
are thrown out, you give up the family pet to try to save money even 
though that dog may have been your son's or daughter's. My son and my 
grandson and granddaughter just got a little stray that their father 
picked up when he was out jogging and picked a little dog. It has only 
been a week and a half, and they love this beautiful little dog. So 
families give up the pet to try to save money. When that is not enough, 
you sit the kids down and you have to tell them you are moving. They 
will have to change schools. Mom will not be around as much because mom 
has gotten a second job.
  These are the impossible decisions and painful conversations millions 
of Americans were forced to have in 2007, 2008, and 2009 because of the 
big banks' greed and, in some cases, their illegal activity. Trillions 
of dollars of housing wealth were destroyed. African-American and 
Hispanic families lost more than half of their accumulated wealth--
wealth they still have not fully recovered.
  We can't go back there. These stakes are too high. That is why some 
of the provisions in this bill are so troubling.
  Let me run through a few of them. This bill permits mortgages for 
homes up to $400,000 in some areas to be offered without an appraisal 
to verify the home is worth what you are paying. Without an appraisal, 
you know what would happen. You could end up in an underwater mortgage 
on day one. It no longer requires banks to set up accounts that help 
you budget for your property tax and homeowner's insurance. Instead of 
manageable payments built into your monthly mortgage, you could end up 
with an unexpected tax bill at the end of the year. You could end up 
with an unexpected insurance bill at the end of the year. If you can't 
pay, then, the foreclosure proceedings start.
  It allows some banks to sell you an adjustable rate mortgage without 
the bank assuming any responsibility for whether you can afford your 
payments once the initial rate expires. People don't always know what 
it means with an adjustable rate mortgage. It might be in the small 
print. We know forced arbitration is in the small print, too. We know 
how that works out. Say you are a customer in Youngstown, and you could 
take out a mortgage at 4 percent. Say your payment is $400 a month. 
After 3 years, your interest rate jumps to 9 percent, so your monthly 
payment is all of a sudden almost $700. Your bank knows you can't 
afford that. The bank knew it when it sold you the mortgage or it 
should have known. That is the bank's job. That is the law today. It is 
not the law under this bill.
  Under this bill, when your mortgage suddenly spikes, when you have to 
start having these tough conversations around the dinner table with 
your partner, with your children, the bank that sold you the mortgage 
is protected. It gets off scot-free. Today, you could go to a judge and 
fight to stay in your home. You might not be able to under this bill. 
What is fair about that?
  This bill blocks some homeowners from going to court to stop banks 
that foreclosed on them. Sound familiar?
  Not that long ago Vice President Pence came to the Senate floor to 
sit in the chair that the Senator from Oklahoma is sitting in, and he 
came to the floor late at night to stop customers like those 140 
million cheated by Equifax and several million cheated by Wells Fargo 
from having their day in court. When the Vice President shows up in 
this body to break a tie, Wall Street wins every single time.
  Now, this bill blocks homeowners from having their day in court. It 
is the context under which we will consider this bill. American 
families and American taxpayers, who stand to lose the most, get almost 
nothing--no help with student debt and no help with underwater 
mortgages. But we are hearing consumers being told: Don't worry. Trust 
us. Trust us.
  The Trump administration regulators will make sure everything is just 
fine. Trust us. Trust people like Vice President Pence, who cast the 
tie-breaking vote to strip consumers from their day in court. Trust 
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, whose former bank made a fortune kicking 
families, including veterans, including people in the Army and the 
Marines and seniors, out of their homes and has now merged into a new 
bank that gets relief under this bill.
  Trust Secretary Mnuchin's colleague at that same foreclosure machine, 
Joseph Otting, now leading the Office of the Comptroller of the 
Currency, the financial watchdog in charge of overseeing the national 
banks. Think about that. Trust him.
  Trust Mick Mulvaney, installed as the new part-time head of the 
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite what the law says, whose 
first action on the job was to stop payments to veterans, to seniors, 
to consumers, and to stop payments to people who had been cheated by 
banks. These payments were on their way. The banks had been found 
guilty of cheating their customers, and Mick Mulvaney's first action as 
head of the consumer bureau was to stop those payments.
  Trust Randy Quarles, the new head of Supervision at the Federal 
Reserve Board, who was a Treasury official in the years leading up to 
the crisis and who said on the eve of the financial crisis: 
``Fundamentally, the economy is strong, the financial sector is 
healthy, and our future looks bright.'' He was in the Treasury 
Department in a highly placed job in the Bush administration. As the 
economy started to implode, that was his observation of the state of 
housing and that was his observation of the state of the economy. He is 
now head of bank supervision at the Federal Reserve.
  Is this track record what taxpayers and homeowners are supposed to 
trust? Is this the track record that gives Senators the confidence to 
take a gamble with taxpayer dollars? Are these guys going to protect us 
from another crisis or prevent another bailout?
  I don't know about my colleagues, but I will tell you that when I am 
home in Ohio and when my friend from Delaware is at home in Wilmington, 
we meet a lot of people who feel invisible. Entire communities feel 
invisible. They feel used, they feel abused, and they feel some other 
things I can't say on the Senate floor by banks, by mega corporations, 
by Wall Street and, yes, by Washington and by this U.S. Senate. Too 
often, they are right. They are being used and abused by banks and by 
mega corporations and by Wall Street and by people in this body.

  We have a chance to show these people that we see them, we hear them, 
we work for them, and that we will do our jobs and fight for them. We 
do that by blocking this bill.
  As I conclude, I want to say something about some people who are 
affected by this bill that makes sense. Regional community banks 
provide

[[Page S7823]]

critical services to customers and homeowners and small businesses. I 
respect my colleagues' desire to support them. I do support efforts to 
help community and regional banks fill important needs. I don't support 
efforts to roll back accountability measures on the largest banks, with 
nothing to help hard-working Americans who have the most to lose.
  It is this simple: If we want to help the middle class, let's help 
the middle class.
  We sat here the last couple of weeks--both in the Finance Committee 
and on the floor--on the tax bill. I heard ad nauseam my colleagues say 
that this tax bill is for the middle class. Well, it really wasn't for 
the middle class. If you want to cut taxes for the middle class, you 
cut taxes for the middle class. Same here. If we want to help the 
middle class, let's help the middle class, whether it is the Tax Code 
or banking laws. You don't grow our economy by handing out more money 
to the people at the top, whether it is Wall Street banks or whether it 
is large corporations that outsource jobs. You don't give handouts to 
the wealthiest people with sort of a bank shot. Get rid of the 
middleman. If you want to help the middle class, darn it, help the 
middle class. Don't filter it through the largest banks and the largest 
corporations, hoping something will trickle down. We grow our economy 
by putting money directly into the pockets of middle-class families.
  Let's cut the corporate middleman. Let's throw out the Wall Street 
lobbyists. Let's provide relief for student loan debt and mortgages and 
community banks. Let's help workers who haven't seen a raise in over a 
decade. Let's show the people of this country that we actually do, in 
fact, work for them.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 
10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Delaware is recognized.

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