Lawmakers Eye Small Biz, Credit, and Financial Reform
Sep 28th, 2009 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: RegulationsOver the past week, the talk on Capitol Hill took a welcome detour for those of us who would like to hear about something besides health care reform because, last week, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) released what has been called a “discussion draft” of the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 3126). The proposal comes from a fairly simple idea. Federal consumer protections exist for products. As the financial services industry gets more innovative and creates more exotic and sophisticated products and services, the thinking goes, the need for a similar government watchdog function has arisen to protect consumers in the area of financial products and services.
The Financial Services Committee will be holding a hearing on the bill later this week but House Small Business Committee Chair Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) convened her own hearing last week to explore what H.R. 3126 might mean for the nation’s “community lenders” and small businesses. Problems identified with the bill include contentions that its wording is too broad, that government should be primarily concerned with systemic risk and regulating the unregulated (rather than imposing more regulations on those already being policed), and that whatever Congress does should not to make the access to capital situation more difficult for small firms than it is already. This bill is likely to move, simply because the White House wants it, but it probably won’t make it to the President’s desk before next year.
