Volcker Rule Regulatory Harmonization Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DUFFY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding time to me.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate Mr. Hill on putting together such a great bill, the Volcker Rule Regulatory Harmonization Act, a bill that you might not know from this conversation has wide bipartisan support in our committee, which has a lot of different views, left and right. It passed 50-10--passed 50-10.

I want to talk about the Volcker rule in a second, but my good friend across the aisle--I call her a friend--is talking about big banks and all the bad things they are doing. Listen, when banks do well, our communities do well. When banks don't do well, we see crises spread across America, and people get hurt.

When we talk about some of the biggest banks and making sure they have strong and stiff regulation, I would agree with the ranking member; but when we talk about their stock prices going up, we have got to ask: Who owns J.P. Morgan? Who owns Wells Fargo? Who owns the biggest banks in America?

The people who President Trump had on his stage yesterday in the Rose Garden: It is truck drivers. It is the Wisconsin teachers. It is the people who work across this country who put money in their 401(k)s that own all of these stocks. And when those stock prices rise, so, too, do the values of the 401(k)s, because they own those American businesses.

When you look at the Volcker rule and this ham-handed way in which it was put together and you are starting to reduce marketmaking in an effort to get away from proprietary trading, what you find is more volatility. And what you see then is the price of mortgages actually go up.

Having markets that actually work is a way to get the most efficient pricing to homeowners, which is what we are trying to do here, which is why so many Democrats voted for a bill like this from Mr. Hill.

I know this is not a housing conversation, but it is true that there are a lot more homeless people in America. We were devastated by the Obama economy.

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Mr. DUFFY. Mr. Speaker, I think we can't deny the fact that, when you want to buy a house, you have to have a salary. You have to have a job.

As the President likes to point out, the unemployment rate for the African-American and the Hispanic communities, of which my wife is one, is at all-time lows. They have jobs. And when you have a job, you have a salary. When you have a salary, you can buy a house.

What I don't want to do is what we did before the 2008 crisis, which is give mortgages to people who can't afford to pay them, and then they lose those homes in foreclosure and their lives are devastated. We want to make loans to people who can afford to pay the mortgage and keep their home. Now is the time under a Trump economy where people have jobs, income, and can now afford to buy a home.

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