Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2016
Floor Speech
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to H.R. 6392. This is the first step in the Trump agenda to deregulate Wall Street, despite candidate Trump's pledges to hold elite bankers accountable. In fact, as we debate this bill today, Trump Tower's revolving door is spinning with Wall Street insiders.
Yes, in a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, Trump and his transition team are plotting their agenda to weaken financial reform and bring us back to the precrisis Wild West days when banks could gamble with taxpayer money. Bank stocks are up on news of gifts to come, and newspaper headlines are already documenting Republicans' aggressive plans.
In fact, President-elect Trump just announced that he will nominate Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who now sits on the board of the megabank CIT, to be his Treasury Secretary. Mr. Mnuchin's bank is just one of 27 banks that stands to benefit directly from this legislation. Though CIT crashed--that is the bank--and went bankrupt during the crisis because of high-risk commercial lending and subprime loans, somehow Mr. Mnuchin still managed to sign an employment deal, handing him $4.5 million a year in 2016. I suppose passing this legislation is just the Republican Congress' way of giving him a signing bonus for coming into government.
We enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in response to the stunning greed and regulatory failures in our financial system; and yet, with this bill, the Republicans are displaying a staggering degree of historical amnesia.
This bill is the epitome of that dangerous agenda, with H.R. 6392 gutting our banking regulators' oversight of $4.5 trillion in banking assets, or approximately 30 percent of the industry currently subject to enhanced rules.
Make no mistake. This bill is not about helping the community banks because 99 percent of our country's community banks and credit unions are already exempt from most rules in Dodd-Frank. So I don't want anybody to come out here saying: we are helping the community banks. This has nothing to do with the community banks. This is about deregulating the big banks over $50 billion.
It is also not about tailoring regulations for regional banks. Wall Street reform already required that, and the Federal Reserve is already taking steps to do so. No, this bill is about a wholesale regulatory exemption for just 27 of the biggest banks in America--banks with $100 billion, $200 billion, and even $400 billion in assets.
Many of the types of banks that would benefit from this bill failed spectacularly during the financial crisis. In fact, large bank holding companies with more than $50 billion in assets received twice as much bailout money per dollar than banks with less than $50 billion in assets.
Contrary to the talking points from the other side of the aisle, these megaregional banks are not just big community banks. No, these regional banks are some of the worst players in predatory, subprime lending leading up to the financial crisis. They have preyed on minority and rural communities and have passed the buck onto taxpayers when their bets failed.
Remember Countrywide, a $200 billion thrift? They were the number three subprime mortgage originator and number one issuer of mortgage bonds in 2006. They are a poster child of the crisis.
Remember Washington Mutual, with $300 billion in assets, whose hometown paper, The Seattle Times, described as ``predatory''?
Remember Wachovia, with their exotic ``pick-a-payment'' mortgage loans? Remember in October of 2008, when they posted a $24 billion quarterly loss and the FDIC had to facilitate a midnight acquisition by Wells Fargo?
Remember New Century, AmeriQuest, or Option One? This bill would enable more blowups like these.
H.R. 6392 would repeal Dodd-Frank's $50 billion threshold above which banks are subject to closer regulatory scrutiny and prevent the Federal Reserve Board from regulating these banks. Instead, it would hand over that responsibility to what is known as FSOC, the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
In order to regulate the banks, the FSOC would have to go through a Byzantine and litigious process of designation, which takes 2 to 4 years to complete. This would give them plenty of time to go back to the old ways that Dodd-Frank is trying to prevent. Even if a potential Treasury Secretary Mnuchin decided to regulate his former employer, by the time he got around to it, the damage would likely already be done.
It is also significant to note that Republicans have repeatedly tried to dismantle the FSOC and its existing designation authority for large nonbanks. They have called the Council ``unconstitutional,'' introduced bills to make it harder for the FSOC to do its job, and helped companies like MetLife fight its designation in court.
What is more, Chairman Hensarling's sweeping Wall Street deregulation bill, the ``Wrong Choice Act,'' would repeal this exact same designation authority altogether.
Why is the majority even considering this bill today when the chairman's Wall Street reform repeal package would render this bill moot? It is clear that this is just the first act in a long, dangerous play that will continue well into next year. I, therefore, urge my colleagues to join me in opposing this harmful bill.
Mr. Speaker, as I said when I took the floor to debate this bill, this is the first act in Trump's promise that he is going to deregulate, his promise that he is going to get rid of Dodd-Frank, his promise that he is going to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and his promise that he is going to, in essence, turn all of this back over to Wall Street.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, Democrats, small town America, Rust Belt America, you just heard what he said. Mr. Hensarling just said: You ain't seen nothing yet. You heard it coming out of his mouth as they stand here and defend deregulation of these big banks.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, while the other side fights for the big banks and we over here are fighting for the consumers, let me just say that Mr. Frank has not supported H.R. 6392, and you need to stop saying that.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, it was just said that this is affecting Main Street. It is not. All that passion you see on the other side is about the big banks, not about community banks.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Wisconsin has the audacity to come to this floor and say that we are crushing these pitiful little banks with $50 billion or more. No. You are crushing the average person who gets up every morning, who goes to work, and who is trying to take care of their
families and is getting ripped off by these financial institutions.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Here we are in the lameduck session of Congress, and we are signaling to special interests all the giveaways that are about to come with Republicans in control of Washington. And we do this just after the President-elect selected a man to head the Treasury Department whose bank has been accused of redlining and violating the Fair Housing Act, whose bank was responsible for about 40 percent of reverse mortgage foreclosures in 2009 to 2014, and whose bank was characterized by a New York judge as engaging in harsh, repugnant, shocking, and repulsive acts against debtors.
Donald Trump ran a campaign on anti-Wall Street rhetoric, but appointing a former hedge fund manager, Goldman Sachs, executive and bank CEO, as Treasury Secretary shows his true colors. Mr. Mnuchin is a Wall Street insider with ties to big banks that have a troubling past of putting profits ahead of consumers and taxpayers. Mnuchin, during his time at OneWest, during his time, foreclosed on homes of 36,000 families.
Mr. Mnuchin now sits on the board of CIT, which bought his former bank. Mnuchin took a reported $10.9-million payout when the merger was completed. CIT's regulatory filings indicate that the bank provides Mr.
Mnuchin with annual compensation of $4.5 million for each of 2015, 2016, and 2017, which gives a base salary of $800,000, short-term incentives of $1.4 million, and long-term incentives of $2.3 million. That is 88 times the household income of the average American family.
What is worse, CIT is a megabank, and, instead of paying back taxpayers, it went bankrupt, like many of Mr. Trump's failed businesses.
Mnuchin is a man who got rich off of the foreclosure crisis and taxpayer bailouts again--not unlike Mr. Trump himself--and he will now have oversight over significant swaps of our financial regulatory system.
H.R. 6392, in particular, is President-elect Trump's and the congressional GOP's first effort to deregulate Wall Street since the election.
This bill stands to benefit just 27 banks in the United States, and one of those banks is Mr. Mnuchin's bank, CIT. In fact, CIT just recently completed a merger with OneWest, which made Mr. Mnuchin rich. That merger also pushed CIT over the $50-billion threshold that would make the bank subject to Dodd-Frank rules. Rather than submit to more stringent regulation, CIT is trying to grease the skids to get favorable treatment in Congress so that its megamerger won't come with any strings attached. Specifically, this legislation would eliminate CIT from being subjected to more stringent Dodd-Frank rules related to capital, liquidity, risk management, living wills, stress testing, and other crucial requirements that prevent bailouts.
What is more, the legislation would take authority to regulate banks away from our independent regulators and hand that power over to this man, who I am telling you all about, who has a history of proving to have not only foreclosed on a lot of innocent homeowners, but who is, maybe, I think, under investigation now by HUD.
Again, this legislation would take the authority to regulate banks away from our independent regulators and would hand that power over to him. Mr. Mnuchin would now, per H.R. 6392, be in the driver's seat to determine which banks get regulated and how. That means he could give special favors to his bank while ignoring similarly situated banks, not to mention our financial stability.
My friends on the opposite side of the aisle will tell us: Oh, that is a bailout we had to do in order to keep this country from going into a depression.
You force taxpayers to make that bailout--to pay for it. Now here we are today with a President-elect who pays no taxes. So why would he be worried about whether or not we have a bailout?
I would say this is one of the worst bills that is going to come before us; but just like Mr. Hensarling said: We ain't seen nothing yet.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to the gentleman's amendment.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Madam Speaker, this bill outsources our domestic regulation by the Federal Reserve and hands it over to an international group of regulators known as the Financial Stability Board, or the FSB, to determine which banks should be regulated by our regulators. It says this international body should decide which banks are regulated, not the United States Congress.
The U.S. is just one member nation among many represented on the FSB, and the Republicans have often criticized this board of regulators for being ``shadowy'' and not sufficiently deferential to American interests.
Currently, the FSB makes determinations on which global banks are systemically significant--not significant to the U.S., but to the entire global economy. This legislation imports those determinations and sets our domestic regulation on autopilot. If the international regulators say you are important, then this bill would grandfather you into Dodd-Frank. If not, then you get the big giveaway of deregulation.
This amendment rightfully says that the U.S. shouldn't be giving away our sovereignty over our economy to international regulators, but the amendment fails to have the courage of its convictions. Curiously, it says that nothing in this bill shall broadly apply international regulatory standards to the U.S., with an exception for the part of the bill that applies international regulatory standards to the U.S.
In summary, Democrats who oppose the deregulation of big banks should oppose H.R. 6392, and Republicans who oppose outsourcing our regulation to foreign bureaucrats should oppose H.R. 6392. This amendment does nothing to solve this fundamental issue in the bill, and this legislation is still deeply problematic even if the amendment is accepted.
Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Madam Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.
Madam Speaker, make no mistake. This bill is the opening salvo in the Trump plan to dismantle Dodd-Frank. The House Republicans have been trying for 6 years, ever since we passed Wall Street reform; and on the eve of the President-elect's taking office, this is their big chance to deregulate 27 of the Nation's largest banks.
This bill would strip rules around capital, liquidity, stress testing, and living wills--key components to guard against catastrophic bank failures. These are not community banks. No. These are $50-, $100- , $200-, and $400-billion banks that engage in exotic products like ``pick-a-payment,'' which is when you choose how much you want to pay; and ``negative amortization'' loans, which is when, incredibly, the loan principal goes up, not down, leading up to the financial crisis.
This bill would strip Fed Chair Janet Yellen of the Fed's independent authority and hand it over to Trump's Wall Street Treasury Secretary, a man who foreclosed on 36,000 families when he ran this bank, a man who has been accused of redlining and fair lending discrimination by civil rights and advocacy groups, a man who would be handed the authority to deregulate the bank on whose board he now serves, if this bill became law. But those conflicts of interest are par for the course in this incoming administration.
President-elect Donald Trump has more conflicts of interest than any incoming President in the history of this country. Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, has hundreds of millions of dollars in loans outstanding from domestic and foreign banks and has obtained development financing through a controversial U.S. program that sells green cards.
Legal scholars believe Trump's lease with the government over the Old Post Office Building where his hotel in Washington, D.C., stands will trigger a breach of contract and a conflict of interest the moment he is sworn in. And Trump may even violate the Constitution on the day he takes office, with former-President Bush's ethics lawyer saying that foreign diplomats staying in his hotels would be an unlawful foreign gift.
Madam Speaker, this amendment highlights yet another conflict of interest we are facing. President-elect Trump is deeply indebted to Deutsche Bank. Over the past two decades, Deutsche Bank has been a lender or a co-lender in at least $2.5 billion in loans to Donald Trump or his companies.
Here is a sampling of Trump's indebtedness to Deutsche: The businesses within Trump's network currently owe Deutsche Bank nearly $360 million in outstanding principal, including $125 million for his Florida golf course, up to $69 million for his Chicago high-rise, and a $170 million line of credit used to fund the development of his new hotel in Washington, DC.
This legislation, H.R. 6392, deregulates huge megabanks representing almost 30 percent of the assets currently subject to stricter rules under Dodd-Frank. In the bill, it is possible that the U.S. operations of global megabanks--megabanks like Deutsche Bank--would also be deregulated. And with Donald Trump's appointments interpreting the law, I suspect they will indeed deregulate these global megabanks.
Why is this important? Well, it is important because Deutsche Bank has a potential $14 billion settlement with the Department of Justice pending related to toxic mortgages they packaged and sold leading up to the financial crisis. They sliced and diced subprime loans and duped not only homeowners, but unsuspecting investors. Just like President- elect Trump, they saw the specter of a foreclosure crisis and financial collapse as a business opportunity, not a human tragedy. After Trump's election, news headlines said that Deutsche Bank stood to get a windfall because the new sheriffs in town would go easy on them.
This amendment says enough is enough. While the Trump Justice Department may give Deutsche Bank a break, the United States Congress will not stand idly by and let Trump's conflicts of interest grease the skids for powerful interests in Washington.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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