Mortgage Reform And Anti Predatory Lending Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Let me thank the Chair for his shepherding this critically important piece of legislation to the floor and getting us to this point.

Mr. Chairman, I am very grateful that the Chair and all the members of the committee were able to include in the manager's amendment what I believe is almost the very heart of the problem here, and that is that people who qualified for certain kinds of loans were steered to loans that made certain other folks more wealthy and other people who were out to seek loans had their credit ratings mischaracterized. Sometimes people had appraisals that were false and not true, and then, of course, people who were eligible for certain loans were literally discouraged from shopping around to get a better loan.

This type of steering is not ambiguous; it's not middle-of-the-road stuff. It is just wrong. And I am glad that the manager's amendment is going to direct the Secretary to promulgate rules that will put certain no-nos into the bill that would prevent steering.

I think if we had not had the level of steering that we had, we would not have the number of exotic subprime loans that we had, predatory loans. And if we didn't have that, we very likely would not be at the depth of trouble that we're in right now.

So I'm very happy that this is included in the manager's amendment, that we will have some clear don'ts that we will ask rules to be promulgated on, prohibiting mischaracterizing of appraisals, prohibiting discouraging shopping around, prohibiting mischaracterization of credit scores and others.

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