Flickr: respres
In a major speech on Wall Street on Monday, the President outlined his financial reform plan, which included the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect consumers from deceptive and unfair practices by the banking and financial services industries, from banking to credit cards, to mortgages. Unless we have one agency with the sole purpose of protecting consumers from all types of financial scams, it’s all the more likely that the kind of near financial meltdown the country faced late last year will happen again.
As the President said in his speech: “We could not separate what was happening in the corridors of our financial institutions from what was happening on factory floors and around kitchen tables…. This was no longer just a financial crisis; it had become a full-blown economic crisis, with home prices sinking, businesses struggling to access affordable credit, and the economy shedding an average of 700,000 jobs each month.”
One year ago, we all watched in horror as a number of the largest financial institutions on Wall Street collapsed or were bought or bailed out. And it wasn’t because we were concerned about the executives who lost their stock options. It was the impact on the rest of us: declining home prices and foreclosures, lost jobs, and the decline in value of our 401k pension plans (for those who had any pensions).
Yet, media accounts indicate that many Wall Street executives are continuing their old tricks, including inventing new deceptive financial products to sell to consumers — without any oversight by government — and planning big end of year bonuses for the executives that got us into this crisis.
We join President Obama in saying: this must stop!
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