[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18992-18993]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1040
                THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
North Carolina (Mr. Watt) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WATT. Madam Speaker, later this week, the United States Senate is 
scheduled to consider the President's nomination of Richard Cordray as 
the person to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And while 
our rules don't allow us to meddle much in the Senate activities, I do 
want to spend a minute or two just talking about the importance of the 
nomination and confirmation of Richard Cordray and the importance of 
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and talk a little bit about 
the background of why we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  The purpose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to promote 
a fair, honest, and transparent marketplace to help consumers compare 
cost, benefits, and risk of consumer financial products. Consumer 
financial products are perhaps among the most complicated products that 
consumers have to deal with; credit card terms, mortgages, and the 
kinds of things that resulted in a financial meltdown in our economy.
  Now prior to the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, there was, in every 
one of the regulatory bodies, a responsibility to deal with consumer 
protection. Unfortunately, none of those agencies had consumer 
protection and education as their highest priority. All of them were 
looking at--not very well, I will say to you--the safety and soundness 
of the financial industry, the banks and various components of the 
financial industry. And generally, they interpreted safety and 
soundness to be, as long as these institutions are making a big profit, 
they are safe and sound. And they turned their backs on the interests 
of the consumer, not knowing that if the consumers purchased a lot of 
very bad mortgages and got themselves into a lot of very bad financial 
transactions, that that would cause the whole system to come tumbling 
down.
  So when we passed the Dodd-Frank bill, we put into the bill a 
provision to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so that 
there would be somebody in the Federal Government, some agency whose 
sole responsibility is to look out for the consumer; and of course, a 
number of my colleagues, both in the House and the Senate, have been 
fighting this whole concept from day one. They don't like the fact that 
there is a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they have vowed 
not to confirm any nominee that the President sends over there to head 
this agency. The agency is doing good work already, but it needs a 
director.
  Despite not having a director, the Consumer Financial Protection 
Bureau has launched a number of initiatives, most notably the ``Know 
Before You Owe'' project which aims to simplify mortgage disclosure 
forms and helps students better understand the financial aid process 
and repayment options. These are things that are important to 
consumers. They don't necessarily make up the focus of financial 
entities, the big banks, the lenders, but our whole economic system is 
based on an educated consumer. And when consumers get into bad 
transactions, we suffer, as we have in this financial meltdown. We have 
lost more wealth from mortgages being under water than from any other 
financial kinds of transactions. And if we had had a Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau in place when this calamity was taking place, we 
wouldn't be in the financial mess that we are in today.

[[Page 18993]]



                          ____________________