I spoke with Ellen Harnick, Senior Policy Counsel of the Center for Responsible Lending about the initial testimony being made in Congress on the formation of a Consumer Protection Agency for financial products. Ellen is my first repeat guest, a wealth of information and she has a great way of explaining what is going on. She has offered to check in periodically as consumer policy develops in Washington. Here is some of her previous congressional testimony.

I made another attempt to Skype since Ellen is in North Carolina and I’m in NYC – this time there wasn’t the crazy lag when capturing the audio. Progress in technology is measured in baby steps, my friends.

Check out the podcast.

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One Comment

  1. Edd Gillespie June 28, 2009 at 10:08 am

    As usual any discussion about the banks and their manufactured credit crises is elixir to me, but I’m trying to figure out what I came away with from that. Not to say that the need, sincerity or ability and drive are missing in what she said, I think all of that is there. Perhaps her discussion about the regulatory agency shopping by lenders is the fly in the ointment. The banks aren’t going to stand for that to be interfered with. Obama admits that the banks won’t do what he is asking them to do and it hasn’t mattered so much to them what the law is to say nothing of what is right.
    Not to be numbered among the opportunistic, but it seems to me that there is lots of room for an industry to counsel borrowers about what their mortgage lender plans to do to with the loan they are purchasing. And what a tremendous opportunity we have to shift from protecting the lenders, who have demonstrated they need watching more than protecting, to protecting the economy. To heck with any appraiser/client stuff unless it is contractual. What an appraiser does is to tell the truth and covering that up with confidentiality is nuts.
    So, I am saying as an appraiser, knock off with protecting the lender and get on with the public trust. Protecting lenders is toxic to the public trust. I can’t imagine anything more ridiculous. Enable the efforts of The Center for Responsible Lending and develop a transparency service for consumers.

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