As reported in Huffington Post
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed hostility to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a fountain with knowledge of Geithner’s views.
The financial reform poster passed by the Senate on Thursday mandates the creation of a reinvigorated federal entity charged with protecting consumers from predatory lenders.
But allowing that Geithner has his way, the most prominent advocate for creating the agency may not be picked to lead it.
Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School whose 2007 journal article advocating the creation of such an agency inspired policymakers to personate it into law, has rocketed to prominence since the onset of the financial crisis as one of the leading reform advocates fighting on benefit of American taxpayers.
Warren has been an aggressive proponent for the counting-room in public and behind the scenes, working regularly with President Barack Obama’s surmount advisers and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Since 2008, she has overseen the Congressional Oversight Panel, a bailout watchdog created to preserve tabs on how two administrations spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to handle out Wall Street while struggling to keep distressed homeowners out of foreclosure and weak businesses from collapsing.
Yet while her work on behalf of a treaty unit designed solely to protect borrowers from abusive lenders has been embraced by the administration, Warren’s role as a bailout watchdog led to strained relations through the agency her panel has taken to task with brutal reports every month since Obama took office: Geithner’s Treasury Department.
It’s ~t one secret the watchdog and the Treasury Secretary have had a thin relationship. Geithner’s critics have enjoyed watching Warren question him for the period of his four appearances before her panel. Her tough, probing questions without interrupti~ the Wall Street bailout and his role in it — ~times delivered with a smile — are featured on YouTube. One video is headlined “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm.”
While her grilling of Geithner in September, through the whole extent of what members of Congress have called the “backdoor bailout” of Wall Street through AIG, inspired the “squirm” video, just last month Warren pressed Geithner steady the administration’s lackluster foreclosure-prevention plan, Making Home Affordable. Criticizing him according to Treasury’s failure to keep families in their homes, she questioned Treasury’s pledged relation to homeowners.
Warren’s persistent oversight is part of the conception for Geithner’s opposition, according to the source.
In adding, her increasing public profile could make it difficult for Geithner, who desire oversee the unit until it’s transferred to the Federal Reserve. His role would unite trying to balance her advocacy on behalf of borrowers with the demands of the population’s major financial institutions, his traditional constituency.
Geithner’s objections to Warren vexation over that role also involve her views on Wall Street, sources assert. The longtime professor believes the nation’s megabanks are Too Big To Fail and be seized of been among the biggest abusive lenders in the country. Her toughness without ceasing giant banks is said to be a longtime source of rigor with Geithner.
Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, is also said to have a strained relationship with Warren, though his stance put ~ her nomination is not known.
Democrats in Congress have been amid her most enthusiastic supporters. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank is single of many influential members who hope she’ll get the nod.
And while labor and consumer groups often butted heads with Geithner attached various aspects of the financial reform legislation, they have lauded his suffer for strong consumer protections. Warren, however, has been referred to of the same kind with a “rock star” among consumer advocates. Many have told HuffPost they’re hoping Obama picks her to head the new bureau.
Geithner’s opposition could have political implications for a White House determined to prove it’s gotten tough without ceasing Wall Street. Since March, Obama has devoted four of his weekly Saturday addresses to highlight and promote the consumer agency.
In March 2009, in reply to a question during a town hall event in Southern California from one place to another the bailout for Wall Street firms and whether Obama supported tougher consumer protections without interrupti~ credit cards, Obama promoted Warren’s academic work:
“The conformity to fact of the matter is that the banking industry has used credit cards and pushed credit cards forward consumers in ways that have been very damaging,” Obama reported according to a transcript. “There’s a woman named Elizabeth Warren who’s a professor at Harvard who did a huge deal of study around this. And she made a simple flash of wit. You know, if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your look, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would house you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your meet ~ to ~, that starts off at zero-percent interest, and once they philanthropic of suck in the — buying a bunch of stuff and unexpectedly it’s 29 percent; and if you’re far advanced two days, suddenly, you know, you just paid another $30, and all kinds of fine print that a lot of folks didn’t discern — well, somehow that’s okay.
“I think in the main having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is material,” Obama added.
Three months later, the administration released its blueprint instead of how it wanted to fix the nation’s broken pecuniary system. Warren’s idea for a consumer agency was a heavily-promoted portion of it.
Warren, a Treasury Department spokesman and a White House spokesperson whole declined to comment for this article.
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Dear Ms.Warren, What an important challenge you face in bringing the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into being! Although you’re reputed to be a woman not easily daunted, it might still be comforting to know that you are not alone. At the recent Alliance for Financial Inclusion meeting of banking authorities from more than 60 developing
Elizabeth Warren is life touted as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. One of the people problems with regulators is that they replace consumers as checks forward corporate discipline. Regulators reduce competition because markets are discovery processes. There is nay one-best-way to sell a product or service, producers and consumers be under the necessity many
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