Romer, Boehner, debate new financial regulations
WASHINGTON — White House adviser Christina Romer said Wednesday the Obama administration’s proposal to overhaul the financial regulatory system should be accepted by Congress because “the status quo is not an option.”
At the same time, the leading House Republican Leader John Boehner said that while the GOP agrees on many aspects of financial regulatory change now being proposed, members of his party worry about the government taking too large a role.
“If you look deeply … we’ll have the federal government deciding what interest ought to be charged on credit cards, having the government decide what kind of financial products are available,” the Ohio Republican said.
“I think it’s just going to be too big of a foot on an industry that already is having financial problems,” Boehner said in an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Appearing on the same program, Romer insisted that wholesale regulatory change is crucial to overall economic health, saying that in the past “there were gaps, there were failures, in our regulatory system, and we need to make it better.”
President Barack Obama was set to detail the administration’s overhaul plan later Wednesday, recommending new powers for the Federal Reserve, a new consumer protection agency to govern lending and credit and new rules that would reach into currently unregulated regions of the financial markets.
An 85-page draft of the administration’s plan details an effort to change a regulatory regime that Obama’s economic team maintained had become too porous for today’s more modern and more complex financial markets.
“What we’re proposing,” Romer said, “is the biggest regulatory overhaul since the Great Depression.”
She took issue with Boehner’s assertion that the government would have too great a say in people’s financial lives.
“What the new consumer financial protection agency is supposed to do is watch out for all the ways that consumers are supposed to borrow,” she said. “The consumer deserves one agency whose whole job is to watch out for them.”
Boehner acknowledged that “certainly there are gaps in the current system.” But he also questioned “how big of a foot does the government have to play in the private markets of our country.”
Romer said on CBS’s “The Early Show” that the administration is “striking the appropriate balance, not bulldozing the whole system.”
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