The White House made it official this morning, appointing Elizabeth Warren to serve as an adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to help the administration set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In a post on the White House blog, Warren writes, “The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”
The move heartens many of her enthusiastic supporters, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). But they continue to urge President Obama to officially nominate Warren to head the Bureau. And they caution that the value of this appointment will depend on how much authority Warren is given. On that point, there’s plenty of confusion.
The Bureau was created when the new financial regulatory reform bill was signed in to law. Recent reports suggest that Warren will not be nominated to officially direct it.
Read her post below:
Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.
The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started–right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.
President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them–way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.
If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field, we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families. But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything. Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings–there’s a lot of work to be done.
When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush. Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back. When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression. She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same: she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.
It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work.
