Providing For Consideration of Conference Report on H.R. 4173, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MANZULLO. Mr. Speaker, we on the Financial Services Committee have spent nearly 2 years holding hearings to determine the appropriate course of action for financial reform.

In September, the committee began marking up legislation to try to address failures in the financial market and plug the holes. The problem is that the two big culprits here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now taken over by the government, could cost the American taxpayers $1 trillion. Those two entities simply are not even--nothing happens to them in this new bill, the guys that caused the problem.

Maybe you could take this 2,000-page bill and gel it into one sentence: you can't buy a home unless you can afford it. That's what caused the problem in the first place.

No credit standards, so-called ``liar loans'' where people were allowed to buy homes when others sat at the closing table knowing full well the new buyers couldn't even make the first payment. So it took the Fed I think 2 years to come up with a rule that says, oh, by the way, if you buy a house, you have to have written proof of your earnings.

I mean, why did we need 2,000 pages of a bill--and none of it's addressed to the GSEs--simply saying Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae won't take the assignment of the mortgage unless the mortgage is sound. That won't solve the problem. We wouldn't have had the complete collapse of the system that we have today. But instead we just created an agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What are these guys going to do besides adding hundreds of more bureaucrats, maybe build a new building somewhere, and they're going to impose regulations in nearly every sector of the economy.

What are they going to say?

All they have to say is, ``If you can't afford to buy a house, you can't have it.'' That should be the extent of the regulations. Yet what do we have now? Instead of one sentence, we have 2,000 pages.

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