Date: 2011-07-26
Speaker: DAVID SCOTT (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Georgia

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume. As my distinguished colleague from Georgia. Congressman WESTMORELAND. pointed out. whom I am very pleased to serve as a cosponsor with on this bill. he very aptly described the very dire situation facing our State of Georgia. Mr. Speaker. as I stand here. Georgia. since the 2008 financial difficulties started in this country. 67 banks have failed. which makes us the leader in the Nation in this area in our State. We have some very capable business people in Georgia and in Atlanta. very sterling leaders of the financial services industry worldwide based out of Atlanta. Were grappling with the recovery. But there is no more important sector of our economy than our banking system. It is. indeed. the heart of our economic system. It pumps out the credit. It pumps out the capital that makes our economy go around. So it is very important that we really deal with an area and with information and with an effective study so that we can grasp the full meaning of what caused this to happen. what were the characteristics in Atlanta or in Georgia that caused this disproportionate number of bank failures. And. indeed. we could learn so much so that we can prevent this type of a collapse in our bank financial system from happening again and make a very valuable contribution. So with that. Mr. Speaker. I want to take just a moment to explain what we are doing with this important bill. H.R. 2056. that we feel will make a very valuable contribution to preventing these kinds of collapses from happening again to the detriment of our economic system. The purpose of this bill is. one. to determine the extent to which certain FDIC practices precipitated the bank failures. We need to find out if theres something that the FDIC was doing. that regulators were doing that we need to improve upon. Two. we need to determine whether various FDIC policies and practices for resolving failed banks are appropriate. Thats very important to know. If what were doing is not appropriate. we can fix that. And. three. we need to determine the extent to which the FDIC employees. themselves. in the field. the investigators. the bank examiners take actions that were consistent with FDIC policies and procedures that we developed here in Washington. In other words. Mr. Speaker. we need to take the time to look at this peculiar situation of this rash of bank failures in one basic geographic area of this country to see what really went wrong and if there were some things that we were doing here in Washington that we need to correct. And. finally. we need to determine the extent to which the FDIC policies and procedures are applied consistently across all banks. This information will be very important. The bill requires that the FDIC Inspector General. within 1 year of enactment of this bill. will conduct a study on the impact of the failure of banks and report the results and any associated recommendations back to Congress. This study would address. one. the effect of the FDICs use of loss sharing agreements on relevant stakeholders. including banks that survive and borrowers of the failed IDI. Two. the significance that paper losses. including the extent to which they trigger IDI receiverships and the impact they have on raising more capital. Three. the success of field examiners in implementing the FDIC policies and procedures on commercial real estate workouts. One of the things we find in our State of Georgia. one of the common characteristics that sort of held these banks separate was the overleverage. we shall say. of the portfolios in real estate and the housing bubble burst on us. Four. the application and impact of consent orders and cease and desist orders. including whether such orders are used consistently across all types of banks. and also the application and impact of FDIC policies. particularly as they relate to a banks ability to attract private capital. And then the FDICs handling of potential investments by private equity companies in banks. In H.R. 2056. as introduced. we received great bipartisan support and reception at a hearing that we recently had that my colleague from Georgia