[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 62 (Wednesday, April 10, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2373-S2375]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Living Wills
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today on the other side of this building,
the CEOs of the biggest Wall Street banks face tough questions about
the way their banks have scammed and broken laws and gotten away with
it, as every American knows. Our Banking Committee staff analyzed the
data, and it is pretty clear that these banks are breaking the laws
over and over and over.
Watchdogs will take enforcement actions against a bank only to find
out the same bank is breaking the rules in an entirely different way in
a different part of the bank at the same time. We need to hold these
banks and the corporate executives who run them accountable for their
actions, which we have simply not done. Trump regulators haven't done
it, and the Senate majority hasn't done it. We simply haven't done it.
Hard-working Americans face real consequences when they break the law,
and so should Wall Street banks.
The chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters,
is doing the right thing in the House calling in these CEOs. We need to
be doing the same thing in the Senate. I have called on my counterpart
on the Banking Committee, Chairman Crapo, to hold a hearing so we can
question big bank executives about their law-breaking.
There are plenty of actions the President and his administration
could take on their own to punish these banks when they break the
rules, but instead this administration and this majority leader do
exactly the opposite. Last year, Congress passed and President Trump
signed legislation rolling back laws protecting working families from
Wall Street greed. The big banks, of course, ask for weaker rules. They
have forgotten what happened. Well, they haven't forgotten, but they
hope the public has. Certainly, the Senate Republicans have forgotten
what happened 10 years ago to this country. So Congress passed and the
President signed legislation rolling back laws protecting working
families from Wall Street greed. As I said, the big banks wanted weaker
rules and they got them, even though that puts millions of families at
risk of losing their jobs and losing their homes again. President Trump
said: OK, let's do what the big banks want.
We know that the White House looks like a retreat half the time for
Wall Street executives, and we know the President of the United States
does the bidding of Wall Street over and over.
The year before weakening these rules, Congress passed and President
Trump signed a $1.5 trillion--that is 1,000 billion, $1.5 trillion--tax
cut for corporations, big banks, and the richest Americans. Since the
Republican tax bill passed, corporations have bought back $900 billion
of their own stock.
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I was in the White House one day with a group of Senators, meeting
with the President of the United States, and he said that this tax bill
they were about to pass--that he hoped would pass--would mean that the
corporations would invest all these dollars into higher wages for
workers and new factories and growing the economy. Well, what happened
with a lot of this money was they used this money for stock buybacks.
Of the eight companies with the most stock buybacks--with billion
dollars of stock buybacks--half of them were Wall Street banks. We know
Wall Street can never get enough--never enough power, never enough
money. They always want more. One bank lobbyist said: We don't want a
seat at the table; we want the whole table.
And this Congress and this President think that is just fine.
The tax giveaways, letting banks haggle over their stress test
results, and taking away customers' rights to have their day in court
when the banks scam them, apparently, just wasn't enough for Wall
Street. Two days ago, the Fed announced that they are going to roll
back more rules on foreign megabanks. These are not just U.S. banks
with U.S. employees. These are foreign megabanks. We are talking about
banks that have broken U.S. law over and over and over. I am not going
to document all of those. But there are many, many cases of these
foreign megabanks breaking U.S. law--banks like Santander, which
illegally repossess servicemen's cars. So when men and women are
overseas protecting our country, Santander, a Spanish-owned bank doing
business in the United States, actually repossessed these
servicemembers' cars.
Deutsche Bank has laundered money. We know Deutsche Bank is about the
only big bank in the world that will finance the President because he
has a history and a habit of cheating banks and not paying back loans.
So because of the relationship that Deutsche Bank and President Trump
have, Deutsche Bank is doing just fine. We also know that Deutsche Bank
laundered money, breaking U.S. law. Not even counting the President's
insidious activities with them, Deutsche Bank broke U.S. law by
laundering money. But do you know what? The Fed gives them rollback
rules because we don't want to be too tough on the foreign megabanks.
Last year, when the President signed his big bank bill, I warned that
it would mean looser rules on those big, foreign banks. They all said:
No, that is not going to happen. Federal Reserve Chairman J. Powell
himself said it wouldn't happen; they are not going to weaken the rules
on the foreign banks. Well, either they were naive at the time--I think
J. Powell is an honest man. I guess I didn't know he was this naive.
But he and others would say: They are not going to weaken foreign bank
rules.
Well, now they have.
When the Fed made the announcement of its plan to go easy on foreign
banks, they said--I am not kidding; this is a quote: ``This proposal
should look familiar because it shares the same basic framework as the
domestic proposal.'' It is as if that is a good thing, as if they are
bragging that we are treating the foreign banks the same way as
domestic banks, but these foreign banks happen to break the law over
and over--Deutsche Bank, Santander, and other banks.
That is not even the only good news for megabanks this week. We got
word that the Fed and President Trump's appointees are going to let the
biggest Wall Street banks off the hook on another rule, but one that
requires something called living wills. Now, living wills doesn't sound
like much. It doesn't mean much to Members of this Senate and to the
general public, unless they are in the Banking Committee and they spend
a lot of time on this.
Living wills are blueprints from banks that are supposed to prove
they will not wreck the economy and cost taxpayers billions of dollars
if they go bankrupt. Now, pretty much the way it works is like this.
The Federal Reserve goes to these banks and they require these banks to
show what would happen if there were a significant downturn in the
economy like there was a decade-plus ago.
When the economy went south in 2007, 2008, and 2009, for these
banks--because they weren't strong enough, because they hadn't had
these stress tests, and because they hadn't gone through these rules
because it wasn't Federal law at the time--it wasn't clear that these
banks would be able to withstand that kind of plummeting of the economy
when demand shrinks and all the things that happen in a recession. They
weren't. So that is why government bailed them out. That is why the
lobbyists lined up in Leader McConnell's office--then, I guess, it was
Leader Fritz's office or Leader Lott's office--and got so much of what
they wanted from Senate Republicans in those days.
The whole point of these living wills is that banks can show, through
a series of complicated tests, that even if the economy goes bad, these
banks aren't going to tank, these banks aren't going to go out of
business, and these banks aren't going to need a Federal bailout. That
is the whole purpose--a big part of the purpose--of Dodd-Frank, the
Wall Street reform bill.
Again, these living wills are blueprints from banks that would prove
they will not wreck the economy and cost taxpayers billions if they go
bankrupt. Under the bill that passed a decade ago to fix this, they had
to go through a stress test every year. Well, this bill the President
signed said that, well, they will not have to go through it quite every
year. The debate was--I said I didn't think we should do it. My
Republican colleagues said: Well, it will probably be every other year.
Maybe that is not so bad.
I said: Well, probably it is. It ought to be every year.
Now the Federal Reserve has said it is just going to be once for
every Presidential 4-year term--once every 4 years. Nobody saw that
coming. I guess the banks saw it coming because the banks had a lot of
influence with them.
So the Wall Street reform law required them to file these plans every
year, and now they require them only every 4 years. It is said that if
those plans didn't look credible and if the banks failed their stress
tests--in other words, they weren't strong enough to withstand a
recession--then, the Federal Reserve and others would have the power to
go in and make these problem banks simpler and smaller. In other words,
if the banks couldn't withstand a bad economy and if these banks were
too fragile and caused too much damage to the economy if they didn't
pass the stress tests, these banks, then, could be broken up into
smaller units, making them stronger. But now financial watchdogs only
have to check into those plans just once a Presidential term, every 4
years. A lot can change and a lot can go wrong in 4 years. Just ask any
family or anyone how their income or rent or savings change. They may
not be the same month-to-month let alone every 4 years.
The people in this town, especially Republicans on the Senate Banking
Committee, have this collective amnesia. They may have forgotten what
the financial crisis and the housing crisis meant. The families who
lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their retirement savings and
their college funds haven't forgotten. They haven't recovered from the
financial crisis. They haven't recovered from decades of bad trade
policy and bad tax policy that make it harder and harder for their work
to pay off.
I don't think Members of this body--there is a wonderful quote from
President Lincoln when he said to his staff: I need to go out and get
my public opinion back. I need to go out and listen to what people are
saying and look at how they are living and talk about their lives.
It is not something people around here do much of, especially when it
is people who might be vulnerable to losing their homes.
I live in Cleveland, OH, Connie and I. We live in ZIP Code 44105.
There were more foreclosures in my ZIP Code than in any ZIP Code in the
United States of America. You can still see the urban blight and the
residue in what is left--the remains of those foreclosures.
Think about what it means to a family personally. The first thing
they have to do is get rid of their pet. Their pet costs too much
money, no matter how close their son or daughter or they themselves may
be to their dog or cat.
Then they have to make all kinds of decisions: We are going to have
to
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move. We are going to have to go to a new school district--all the
kinds of heartache when your life has been turned upside down because
you are foreclosed on.
I am not an alarmist or predicting anything in the next few months,
but if we keep going down this path, weakening Federal banking law,
doing the bidding of Wall Street, if the lobbyists continue to go in
and out of the office of Senator McConnell, the Republican leader's
office, and the bank lobbyists who go in and out of there and get their
way--if that happens and continues to happen, who knows what will
happen again in the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years.
The more we roll back these rules on Wall Street, the more we give
breaks to foreign megabanks, the greedier the big banks get, the more
risk they take on, and the higher the chance that one of their big
risks doesn't pay off.
Mr. President, you know who is paying the price when Wall Street bets
don't pay off. It is you, it is the workers, families, and taxpayers.
It is your money, the American people's money they are gambling with.
So instead of making it easier for Wall Street to make big bets and
break the law without reaping consequences, why don't we make it easier
for families to afford healthcare? Why don't we make it easier for
working parents to afford childcare? Why don't we make it easier for
workers to save for retirement? Why don't we make it easier for
students to pay for college? Why don't we honor the dignity of work and
make sure hard work pays off for everyone, whether you swipe a badge or
punch a clock or work for tips or work for a salary or whether you are
taking care of children or an aging parent? Why don't we make it easier
for them with a tax code and trade policy that works? Instead, all our
efforts and all of the administration's efforts--as I said, the White
House looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives. So much of their
efforts are to make it easier for corporations and to make it easier
for the big banks.
It is time we listened a little more to the Americans we serve, a
little less to the biggest Wall Street banks that have gotten enough
handouts already.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we have no further debate on the nominee.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there further debate?
If not, the question is, Will the Senate advise and consent to the
Morales nomination?
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The yeas and nays have been ordered.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Georgia (Mr. Perdue).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker)
and the Senator from California (Ms. Harris) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
wishing to vote or to change their vote?
The result was announced--yeas 56, nays 41, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 75 Ex.]
YEAS--56
Alexander
Barrasso
Blackburn
Blunt
Boozman
Braun
Burr
Capito
Cassidy
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Daines
Enzi
Ernst
Fischer
Gardner
Graham
Grassley
Hawley
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Inhofe
Isakson
Johnson
Jones
Kaine
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Manchin
McConnell
McSally
Moran
Murkowski
Paul
Portman
Risch
Roberts
Romney
Rounds
Rubio
Sasse
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Shelby
Sinema
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Toomey
Wicker
Young
NAYS--41
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Brown
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Coons
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Feinstein
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hirono
King
Klobuchar
Leahy
Markey
Menendez
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Smith
Stabenow
Tester
Udall
Van Hollen
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING--3
Booker
Harris
Perdue
The nomination was confirmed.
The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that with
respect to the Morales nomination, the motion to reconsider be
considered made and laid upon the table and that the President be
immediately notified of the Senate's action.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
mandatory quorum call be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________