Love him or hate him, Idaho's Blue Dog Congressman is certainly making noise in Washington. After changing a provision in a bill designed to protect consumers from unfair lending practices to instead protect creditors back in April, now Walt Minnick is attempting to change President Obama's plans to regulate Wall Street with a new consumer financial protection agency by eliminating it.
From Politico:
Rep. Walt Minnick, a freshman Democrat from Idaho, has floated the new plan. Instead of creating a new federal agency to protect consumers from predatory financial firms and shoddy products, Minnick’s plan would have existing state and federal regulators work together in a “consumer financial protection council.”
“We’re trying to come up with something that will achieve the objectives of what the White House is asking us to do without creating a new stand-alone federal regulator,” Minnick told POLITICO.
While Blue Dogs support Minnick's alternative, others do not.
Consumer advocates and liberal members of the House Financial Services panel won’t like Minnick’s pitch. They insist that only a new agency focused exclusively on protecting consumers will work, arguing that existing regulators will never see consumer protection as a top priority.
The Treasury Department also argues that the current system of consumer protection in the financial industry is so structurally flawed that only a new agency can set it right.
The article goes on to say that Minnick discussed the proposal with the chairman of the Financial Serives Committee, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) who, Minnick is quoted as saying, was open to talking about it. But Frank told Ryan Grim of Huffington Post, not so fast.
"As soon as I saw the story I called Minnick and said, 'You've really gotta retract it,'" Frank told HuffPost, saying he was "absolutely opposed" to his proposal. He told Minnick as much when they spoke about it last week, said Frank. A Minnick spokesman didn't return a call.
The CFPA, which is still headed for a committee vote in October, Frank said, would be tasked with rating financial products and could restrict or ban those that it found to be deceptive and unsafe for consumers. It is fiercely opposed by both community banks and large financial institutions.
Consumer groups were blindsided by the Blue Dog plan. "We did not know this was coming," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the lead sponsor of the CFPA in the Financial Services Committee.
"An advisory committee is a long way from a watchdog agency with the power to set rules and enforce them," Miller said.
The question has been crystallizing over the last several months: who exactly is Walt Minnick working for? The answer may be becoming just as clear and this dog may actually bite.
I'm getting more and more ticked off.
Posted by: Sisyphus | September 22, 2009 at 01:23 PM