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In my first term in Congress serving the people of Southwest Connecticut, I was proud to help write the Dodd-Frank Act, significant financial reform that protects consumers from abusive lending and mortgage practices by banks.
Today marks the ninth anniversary of Dodd-Frank. Thanks in part to this law, the United States and Connecticut have been on the road to recovery after the 2008 financial crisis.
Now we're taking the next steps.
One of my top priorities remains finding a balance to ensure we regulate the biggest financial institutions while not overly burdening smaller credit unions and community banks, like Bankwell headquartered in New Canaan. I'll also continue to stand up for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created to protect consumers from fraudulent and abusive financial actors, though we've seen the Trump administration try to undermine it and weaken its independence and fair lending enforcement actions.
That's why I voted for and the House recently passed H.R. 1500 the Consumers First Act to reverse actions by the Trump administration and to restore the functions and capabilities of the CFPB to protect consumers.
And to further strengthen consumer protections, I introduced HR 2534, the Insider Trading Prohibition Act, a bipartisan bill to make trading a security based on material unlawful, nonpublic information that was wrongfully obtained, which ends decades of ambiguity for a crime that has never been clearly defined by the law.
My bill unanimously passed the Financial Services Committee and I'm working to make sure it gets to the House floor for a vote.
Consumer protection is not a partisan issue. I'll continue to lead the charge to ensure we come together to pass laws in a bipartisan manner to protect consumers.
Jim |
