[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 16:27:40 09/01/09
The Obama administration and members of Congress are pushing legislation that will create a new agency, The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, whose job would be to simplify and police all manner of financial transactions, from what sorts of mortgages could be offered to what sort of credit cards would be in your wallet to whether Wall Street could create new ways of buying and selling stocks. Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie recently sat down with George Mason University law professor, Volokh Conspiracy blogger, and Mercatus Center scholar Todd Zywicki to get answers. "The agency is one of the centerpieces of the Obama regulatory reform act[s]," says Zywicki, "It goes far beyond how we've thought about consumer credit regulation for the past 30 or 40 years." More importantly, it will do nothing to address pernicious incentives that encouraged banks and consumers to take on more debt than was prudent.
