The newly appointed Consumer Financial Protection bureau adviser Elizabeth Warren has spoken up, and is claiming that financial regulation consolidation will benefit both consumers and banks alike. On Wednesday she gave a speech and shared her hope that Americans will begin seeing banks as friends and not enemies.
"Instead of seeing banks as their friends, as I did when I put my babysitting money in a savings account at Penn Square National Bank so my brothers didn't borrow it out of my sock drawer, too many Americans see dealing with banks like handling snakes - do it long enough and you'll get bit," she said in a speech Wednesday to the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington.
She said the new law will force banks and non-bank lenders to be subject to federal examination and will consolidate consumer financial protection activities performed by seven different agencies into one agency, "closing gaps in oversight."
Warren said the purpose was to make these lenders more palatable and user-friendly for the American people.
"Thanks to the new law, for the first time ever, we will have a single federal agency charged with writing the rules for all mortgages and all credit cards, regardless of whether they are issued by a federally chartered bank, a state chartered credit union, or a group of unlicensed investors," said Warren, in her speech to the Financial Services Roundtable.