Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1315, Consumer Financial Protection Safety and Soundness Improvement Act of 2011
Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. I thank the gen tle lady.
If there is a problem with the Dodd-Frank bill, it is that it was passed 2 years after, rather than 2 years before, the Wall Street meltdown. That was a catastrophe. It was so bad that one of the most conservative Presidents in the history of this country came to Congress with the Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Treasury asking Congress to authorize $750 billion to bail out Wall Street's collapse.
That was an avoidable situation. The reason it collapsed is because of the fact that the only problem worse than no regulation or little regulation is no regulation at all. And that's what Wall Street had enjoyed. The heart of the crisis were these subprime mortgages that were loans to people who had no documentation, no ability to pay them back. They were sold and peddled not because there was even an expectation that they would be paid back, but they were sold to the mortgagees so that they could then be sold off to investors. This was the architecture of catastrophe. And the American economy is still reeling from it.
The tradition of regulation in this country goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican ``trust buster,'' who understood that the public had to be protected, who understood that with proper regulation you set fair rules for business to operate that level the playing field for those good banks to do what's right, to do it in the light of day, to provide protection to consumers who are busy with their own lives and don't have time to go over all of the forms.
This consumer protection agency is absolutely essential to providing fairness to consumers and security in their transactions, to protect them from unscrupulous activity that does and can occur, and it's important to our banks and our financial industry that want to play by the rules and do it the right way. This is very important legislation. We must defeat the, in effect, repeal and retraction of Dodd-Frank.
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