Date: 2016-04-14
Speaker: MAXINE WATERS (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker and Members. my friends on the opposite side of the aisle. who have brought this bill to the floor. claim they care about community banks. even when we know this bill will just result in more consolidation among small financial institutions. Just yesterday the Republicans repealed the mechanism by which we would wind down systemically important firms. This puts us back to the days of September 2008. when our largest financial institutions could not only threaten the entire economy. but also the stability of our community banks. Remember that when Wall Street banks cratered our mortgage system. they devastated the entire economy in ways that damaged not just workers and borrowers. but also small financial institutions. Republicans. likewise. later today will repeal the independent funding for the Financial Stability Oversight Council. our regulator expressly charged with examining the largest. most interconnected. most complex. Wall Street firms. Again. the Republicans want the biggest players to escape scrutiny. thereby threatening our smaller community institutions. Republicans also have failed to put forward credible housing finance reform. Recall that in 2013 the chairman brought up his PATH Act. which would have all but excluded small banks and credit unions from the secondary market. especially handing the keys to our mortgage markets over to the largest Wall Street banks. By eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. community financial institutions across the country would have had mortgage lending come to a halt. Finally. remember that Republicans are willing to hold our government hostage over favors that help the largest banks and only expose our community financial institutions to more risk. We need not go too far back to remember the 2014 fight over the government spending bill. where Republicans were willing to risk a government shutdown in order to repeal DoddFranks swaps pushout rule. which would have required our largest banks to separate their riskier derivatives activity from the accounts holding depositors money. Let us be clear. My chairman has said over and over again. and never fails to remind us. that he hates DoddFrank. He wants to get rid of DoddFrank reforms. He said he would do anything to get rid of DoddFrank and the reforms that were put in place by the Congress of the United States and signed by the President. He forgets what happened in 2008. He forgets the meltdown. He forgets the risk. He forgets about the almost depression that we found ourselves in. He does not want to strengthen the hand of regulators. He does not believe that our regulators should have on their agenda consumer protection. That is why. in all of this struggle. whether it is talking about the small banks oryou should hear him on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He hates that Bureau. and he wants to dismantle that Bureau because they do not want regulations. really. for the biggest banks in this country. Oftentimes. what they are doing is they are benefiting the big banks. but they are making it look as if they are benefiting the smaller banks. So we have to push back very hard on these attempts. Moving from $1 billion to $5 billion is an absolute unraveling of our agreement. It is wrong to work so hard with the opposite side of the aisle and come to an agreement. only to have them renege on it. But. in the final analysis. it is because they would rather put their influence and their time in on what amounts to helping the big banks and not the small banks and forget about what this does to our communities. I reserve the balance of my time.