Republican senators outraged by Wells Fargo’s fraud want to eliminate the agency that uncovered it

[applegrove]

Republican senators outraged by Wells Fargo’s fraud want to eliminate the agency that uncovered it

by Matthew Yglesias at Vox

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12989688/wells-fargo-cfpb

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And it was Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey who raised what was arguably the most salient legal issue of the hearing, namely whether Wells Fargo’s failure to disclose this matter as a potential risk to investors in Securities and Exchange Commission filings constituted a separate breach of securities law.

All of which is to say that while the subject of financial regulation is a sharply partisan and polarized one in Washington — with Republicans routinely charging the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul of hamstringing the economy with red tape and excessive regulation — when actual wrongdoing comes to light, everyone is inclined to agree that it’s important to get tough.

But even while Republicans are outraged by Wells Fargo’s wrongdoing, all the Republican senators who spoke against the bank at today’s hearing have gone on record at various times in calling for the full repeal of President Obama’s financial regulation law — which would mean eliminating the agency that uncovered the wrongdoing and levied the biggest fines.

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Before she was a senator and before Obama was president, Elizabeth Warren laid out the case for creating what became Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, making the point that it’s not good enough for consumer abuses to be against the law — there needs to be an agency charged with specifically enforcing those laws.


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