Conference Report on H.R. 4173, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, others will rise and they will talk about the underlying bill. Although I was on the conference committee, and for 2 weeks Chairman Frank, Ranking Member Bachus and the rest of us were together, I do not claim and will not claim to be an expert on all the things that led to the financial meltdown or all the things which will preclude the next.

I do rise to oppose the Dodd-Frank bill, and I do so because I don't believe that it will preclude another meltdown and another crisis. I don't do that because I am an expert on the financial system. I am not. The people I served with on conference, many of them are. I am not concerned that the process was not open. I think Chairman Frank allowed us an unusually great amount of time to be heard. But I am disappointed that at the end of the day so many things were left out.

I appreciate Chairman Frank's offering for a separate bill to make up for the fact that the transparency and data issues that I worked for 2 weeks to put in this bill, because they were rejected by the Senate, we will have to send them again and hope that the Senate is more benevolent when we simply ask these agencies to have data standards that allow for the kinds of transparency among the regulators that will in fact see reckless behavior ahead of time, or at least allow us to know the underlying value of assets when the markets begin to melt.

The reckless behavior that led to the meltdown will be debated for years, but the absence of transparency at the time of the meltdown, an inability for our regulators, our banks, or anyone else to actually tell us what the underlying value of various assets were, were in no small part the result of arcane systems that underlie these very modern instruments.

You cannot have paper copies sitting in banks to tell you the details about a loan and then cut it into thousands of pieces, spread it around the world, and hope that somebody can have confidence in the document when things start going wrong.

Technology transparency is the most important thing missing from this bill. I hope to work with the majority and the minority to bring that in the coming days. I don't do it for my committee. I do it because the next time there is a hiccup anywhere in the world, even if that's simply a massive power outage leading to a confidence loss, we need to have the ability for regulators with confidence to say we have transparency, we know what these assets are worth, and we can assure them.

This bill does do a few good things, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the ability for banks to trust each other in financial transfers of non-interest-bearing large amounts is in no small part something that will keep the market going if otherwise there is a lack of confidence in the bank.

I do object to the way this bill is paid for. I believe that it was inappropriate. And unfortunately, people at the conference were not willing to consider a real pay-for, not even a real rollback in unexpended funds that would otherwise be available.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is done. We cannot look to what this will or won't do. We have to look to the future. Will we do a better job in data management, in transparency, in creating the tools that would allow the financial oversight board and the financial industry regulators to do the job the next time that they didn't do the last time?

Mr. Speaker, I do not have high confidence that it will be done. I have high confidence that this body will work together to produce a bill, send it to the other body, and try, try to get them to understand that data transparency is essential if we are not going to have another meltdown.

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