Protecting the Middle Class from Financial Predators

[Joanne98]

A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency can save the middle class. Elizabeth Warren explains how.

January 28, 2010

For years, federal banking regulators at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Federal Reserve helped the nation's largest banks wage war on the U.S. middle class. But President Barack Obama wants to change all that with a new regulator that answers exclusively to consumers, not bank balance sheets. AlterNet economics editor Zach Carter discussed the proposal to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) with the woman who came up with the idea, Harvard University Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren. After defending the American middle class for decades, Warrant currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Zach Carter: How did the existing federal bank regulators facilitate today's economic crisis, and how can a CFPA help?

Elizabeth Warren: The big arc of the story is that 30 years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way

http://www.alternet.org/economy/145418/elizabeth_warren_on_the_great_economic_battlefield%3A_protecting_the_middle_class_from_financial_predators

[dkf]

1. How's about mistreatment by health insurance companies?

They are financial companies too after all.

[Mopar151]

2. They are the same people!

The relationship between banks and insurance companies has become incestuous at best. The skeezy credit card that is killing me came from an insurance co.
Derivatives are a hybrid of investment and insurance - and a lot of the reason so many tanked is that they undercut the price of conventional insurance, which is already sold at cost, +/-, and the insurance co. makes their money on the funds thry hold until payout.