WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yana Miles, a Senior Legislative Counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), released the following statement today after the U.S. Department of the Treasury released its review of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a bill signed into law in 2010 that reformed our financial system to prevent abusive financial practices and avoid another Great Recession:
The Treasury Department’s report offers no real solutions to make consumer protection a top priority. It recommends politicizing and weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and contradicts the Administration’s campaign promise of protecting Main Street from Wall Street abuse.
The Dodd-Frank law established reasonable safeguards against dangerous financial practices, such as protection from toxic mortgage loans, and established a consumer agency that serves as our nation’s watch dog on Wall Street. Since its establishment, the CFPB has returned nearly $12 billion in relief to more than 29 million people who’ve suffered at the hands of big banks like Wells Fargo, for-profit colleges like ITT Tech, car-title and payday lenders, credit card companies, and other financial institutions. Any attempt to roll back these measures, as the Treasury Department suggests, would be a disservice to working families.
If this Administration has not learned from the mistakes that caused the 2008 economic crisis, they are doomed to repeat them. Lest we forget, lax oversight allowed Wall Street to back extremely reckless loans whose failure snowballed into a financial crisis. Millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs, and U.S. households lost trillions of dollars. The Treasury’s comments and recommendations is a warning sign of a return to those dark days.
For more information, or to arrange an interview with a CRL spokesperson on this issue, please contact Ricardo Quinto at ricardo.quinto@responsiblelending.org.