The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Title X of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010

I'm going to take us back to the beginning of the day and the meltdown.When we had the meltdown, Consumers Union and many other consumer advocates said: "It's time for a fundamental change."We looked at the fact that everybody was talking about systemic risk, we said OK, that's good, we need to deal with that, we're all taxpayers, but let's also talk about risks to households.We asked for a change in the federal regulatory culture in the banking regulators.We wanted a federal agency, bureau, whatever you'd like to call it, independent of the banking industry, focused on the safety of consumer financial products and an active role for state consumer protection.It's a long bill but Title Ten is not that long; you can read it in one day.I recommend you do so, because you will see that, in fact, it creates a structure to achieve a market with safe consumer financial products and an active role for state consumer protection.Everybody said that the meltdown took us all by surprise, and to a great degree that was true, but predatory practices in sub-prime lending were not new.Legal services advocates in Philadelphia, in Atlanta, and in New York had been talking about harmful lending practices that drained precious home equity from individuals and communities since the late 1990s.In the year 2000, led by the National Consumer Law Center; Consumers Union and other groups begged the Federal Reserve Board to amend the Homeowners Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) regulations to address some of these practices.Almost ten years later the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said there was a regulatory failure.I think what happened between the problems we saw in low-income neighborhoods and the meltdown is that securitization took these practices to scale.For the first time, it was actually possible to make a profit by making a bad loan."Keep the fee and pass the risk," is what we called it when we spoke in Congress.The slicing and dicing spread and amplified that risk around the world. The Dodd-Frank solution is the Consumer Financial Protection BureauAt the time the remarks were delivered, Ms. Hillebrand served as a Senior Attorney and the Financial Services Campaign Manager for Consumers Union of U.