ON GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY

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There are a lot of regulatory successes, and a lot of people are alive today because of those regulations. But there are still too many places where the world remains complicated and opaque. There are still too many places where armies of lobbyists are fighting to rig the system so that the public remains in the dark.

— Consumer Federation of America, March 2013

Putting down rules here and there can be like putting down fence posts on the prairie: They can be too easy to run around. And when the lawyers show everyone how to jog around the fence posts, the regulator responds with more rules. Pretty soon, there are so many rules that it is hard to move.

— Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011

The boogey man government is like the boogey man under the bed. It is not real. It doesn't exist. What is real and what does exist are all the specific important things we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government.

— Remarks on the Senate Floor, October 2013

If there is a lesson from the past five years, it's this: We all lose when consumers cannot readily determine whether they can afford to pay back their loans, and when lenders sell credit in ways that make it hard to see the risks and costs — in other words, when the system is in some ways fundamentally broken.

— Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011

Government agencies work for us, not for the companies they regulate. That means agencies should not be able to cut bad deals and then hide the embarrassing details. The public deserves to know what's going on.

— Blog post, January 2014

When risk and cost aren't disclosed, and when market data and information are not made publicly available, it's bad for families, it's bad for markets, and it's bad for our country.

— Consumer Federation of America, March 2013

Markets work. Capitalism works with a set of rules. We can make the system work with regulation. I'm not somebody who believes it's time to throw the whole thing out. But regulation has got to support it. And the way it supports it, is it increases transparency in this system, it increases honesty in the system. It increases accountability in the system. When you get those things there's plenty of room to make profits. There's plenty of room to be rich, I'm all for that. But it's got to be profits that were made honestly.

— NWO Economics Series, April 2010

By the time the financial crisis hit, a different form of pricing had emerged. Lenders began to use a low advertised price on the front end to entice customers, and then made their real money with fees and charges and penalties and re-pricing in the fine print. Buyers became less and less able to evaluate the risks of a financial product, comparison shopping became almost impossible, and the market became less efficient.

— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013

I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Trade Representative's policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant.

In other words, if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.

— Blog post, June 2013

People want to see action described in terms that make sense to them and that seem fair. They want to see that taxpayer funds aren't being used to shield financial institutions from the consequences of their own actions.

— Bailout oversight committee hearing, April 2009

Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act? I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That's what oversight means. And that's certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis.

— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013

Follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you'll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.

— AFL-CIO Convention, September 2013

In granting Treasury such enormous discretion with TARP money, Congress expected an equal measure of transparency and accountability. Taxpayers have a right to understand clearly what Treasury is doing, why it is doing it, what it will accomplish, and how success will be measured.

— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing of Secretary Geithner, September 2009

Treasury has not explained how its financial stabilization programs fit together to address the problems that caused this crisis. This failure to connect specific programs to a clear strategy aimed at the root causes of the crisis has produced uncertainty and drained your work of public support.

— Open letter to Secretary Geithner, March 2009

When you use corporate resources to support think tanks, there are only two possible outcomes from public disclosure — those contributions do not influence the work of the think tanks or those contributions do influence the think tanks' research and conclusions. Either way, shareholders have a right to know how corporate resources are spent, and, even more importantly, policymakers and the public should be aware of your contributions and evaluate the work of the think tanks accordingly.

— Letter to Bank CEOs, December 2013

What we need is a system that puts an end to the boom and bust cycle. A system that recognizes we don't grow this country from the financial sector; we grow this country from the middle class.

— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013

Every agency is set up so that the regulators hear over and over from the industry and their lawyers and lobbyists. That means the message is the same over and over — regulate less, do less, create an exception. In building the consumer agency, it was so powerfully important to me to try to set it up structurally so that the people in the agency would hear from real families, from customers of banks. That the wind would blow sometimes from the other direction.

— A Fighting Chance

ON THE FINANCIAL BAILOUT

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When I question federal regulators in Banking Committee hearings, they insist that they don't need to take big banks to trial when they break the law. They stand by their claim that settlement agreements are tough enough.

— Blog post, January...