-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Mr. President, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is at its core a law enforcement agency. Congress established the CFPB 15 years ago to protect Americans from fraud, from getting ripped off by banks and credit card companies, financial institutions.
Today's Republican-led resolution weakens the CFPB's ability to protect consumers as part of a broader effort by the administration to shut down consumer protections entirely.
Now let's take a minute to go back in time to the time before the CFPB existed, right before the 2008 financial meltdown. Back then, abusive fees and misleading disclosures meant that Coloradans paid more for mortgages, more for credit cards, and more for student loans. Fly- by-night lenders made massive profits by targeting vulnerable families with excessively high-cost loans, turning credit from a tool for opportunity into a tool for scams.
Financial scammers could all too easily slip through the cracks in oversight. There just wasn't enough oversight. In some cases, there was no oversight. Our neighbors were getting hit with hidden fees and frauds when they took out a mortgage, when they used a credit card, if they were just paying for school. There was no cop on the beat.
The result? By 2008, years of this shady, abusive practice helped spark a devastating global financial crisis. Six million households lost their homes to foreclosure, and a quarter of our families lost 75 percent of their wealth. Americans lost faith in our financial system.
In 2010, Congress created the CFPB to help make sure this could never happen again. Congress gave it a simple job: to protect Americans from getting ripped off. The Bureau cleaned up mortgage markets, debt collection, student loans, and much, much more. It worked to protect veterans and servicemembers.
Fast-forward to today, and the CFPB's results really speak for themselves. The Bureau has delivered $20 billion--that is billion dollars with a ``b''--back to Americans through its enforcement actions. It has brought relief to 200 million Americans and small businesses facing scams or abusive practices.
In Colorado, nearly 67,000 people have sought help from CFPB, including more than 6,200 servicemembers. Thousands of those complaints led to relief for consumers.
It really is a remarkable track record--that is, until it was decided by Republicans to--well, they want to eliminate many of these protections, if not all of them.
This vote today would unwind protections designed for the modern financial system, for the everyday payment apps we all use like Venmo or PayPal. It would allow some of the largest financial firms in a consumer's life to stay in the shadows, to operate outside of any oversight. That is exactly the approach to consumer protection we had 20 years ago, before the CFPB, before the 2008 financial crisis.
This is but the latest attempt to leave consumers vulnerable to scams. In fact, the Trump administration is trying--I think many people believe illegally--to abolish the CFPB entirely. They fired dedicated staff who protect consumers, they canceled the lease on the CFPB's office, and they literally ordered a total shutdown of the Agency--an unprecedented effort to defy Congress.
The administration believes that the CFPB doesn't deserve to exist. Maybe they think that scammers and fraudsters have finally hung it up and have gone to find honest work, but I think the American people know better. The administration wants to take our economy back to the time before the financial crisis of 2009, with weaker protections and no one looking out for consumers. If the Trump administration gets its way, it is clear who the winners will be--loan sharks, shady mortgage companies, junk-fee merchants. The losers will be the rest of America-- any Coloradan who wants a fair deal on a credit card or a mortgage.
Bottom line: More money in the pocket of fraudsters, scammers, and the unscrupulous; less for the little guy to save.
I urge my colleagues to stand up for American consumers and vote no on this resolution.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source