This is an excerpted clip (2:36) of Andrea Mitchell interviewing Barney Frank on TARP on July 10, 2009. Full video (5:35) Partial transcript in extended entry.
Partial transcript:
Frank: Look, we have banking regulators and their primary job is to protect the banking institutions - I understand that. We have historically given them the right to protect consumers, but that's not their primary role.
The Federal Reserve, control of the currency, the FDIC, they just have a primary focus on protecting the banks and the bank system. We think the time has come to have a separate institution that protects the individual customer - on credit cards, on bank overdrafts, on truth in lending, on all of those things. And the administration proposed it. It had been originally proposed by Professor Elizabeth Warner at Harvard Law School. We are going to put that into place so that individuals dealing with financial institutions, it will cover pay day loans. It will cover a lot of things where we have seen consumer abuse, and have an institution whose focus will be on the consumer protection rather than doing consumer protection as kind of an after thought to more important (as they see it) jobs.
Mitchell: Now speaking of Elizabeth Warren and the Harvard law professor who's also leading the Congressional oversight panel, that panel issued a report today. Saying that the Treasury is selling its stakes in banks for one-third less than they're worth. We're talking about billions of dollars here. Does that raise concerns for you?
Frank: It does. I would have to look at them. There is this point that we do want to have the banks to have some funding to be able to do their job. But I have to tell you that the banks have disappointed me some. There was a recent very good study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston about national issues which said that the banks are not really doing what they should be in helping us avoid foreclosure in rewriting mortgages, and again we're expecting the banks that got money from the federal government under the TARP program (as we call it) to do that. So yeah I will be looking at that because the federal government was there when the banks needed it very badly, and I haven't seen the report. I've been in that hearing all day that you mentioned until literally five minutes ago, but I will be looking at that report.
