CHICAGO–(ENEWSPF)–December 5, 2012. Thank you for having me here today. It is great to be back in Chicago, this fascinating city of so many unexpected dimensions, where I spent my law school days. During my first year, I lived on the South Side across the park from where Mayor Washington lived. Outside his building, a large family of green-and-gold “wrong way” parrots, who perhaps had confused their migration patterns from South America, had built an enormous nest. Little did they know they had stumbled upon the safest home in the Northern Hemisphere, since the Mayor’s police security detail was parked underneath their tree 24 hours a day, seven days a week! I also understand that the Mayor was a fierce and valiant defender of those parrots.
This is just one instance of the intricate tapestry of our communities and the interesting connections they represent. My own public service roots were planted firmly in local and state government in Ohio. But your former county executive, the late John Stroger, was the person who introduced me as the nation’s County Leader of the Year for 2005 – an award won this year by your own Toni Preckwinkle. Your very fine City Comptroller, Amer Ahmad, worked alongside me when I served as the Treasurer of Ohio, and he did a fantastic job there as I am sure he is also doing here. And, of course, your Mayor – everyone knows your Mayor, and can see his relentless tenacity to find every single way he can, whether big or small, to make life better for all those who live or work in the City of Chicago.
From my experience in state and local government, I have found that strong partnerships are sometimes difficult to build, but always the best way to get things done. So I especially appreciate the announcement we are making here today.
Chicago is the first city in the country to agree to share information directly with us, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about enforcing the laws that ensure people are treated fairly in the confusing and complex consumer financial markets. We want to learn from and expand on the ways you protect consumers, and to share these approaches nationwide. We also want you to be able to take advantage of the new resources we bring to the arena, including strong analytical tools and a broad mandate to protect consumers against illegal practices.
Every day, millions of Chicagoans use financial products with the goal of achieving prosperity through hard work and sound decisions. Mortgages allow families to invest in a home and pay for it over time. Credit cards give us convenient access to our money when we need it. Student loans make it possible for people with ambition and drive to finance an education and brighten their future. But, as the past few years have revealed all too clearly, if these products are misused, then they also have the potential to wreak havoc on consumers and the wider economy.
Debt can devastate people’s lives. Individual financial problems then become community problems. We saw that quite clearly with the mortgage crisis. The foreclosure epidemic sucked the vitality out of once-vibrant neighborhoods. Vacant properties are not only eyesores, but can become magnets for drugs and crime, and they also lower property tax revenues as they decline in value.
If these properties turn into a dead loss and have to be leveled, you know who pays for that? Of course, the city has to do that. When neighbors see their own property values decline, entire neighborhoods suffer, and cities are forced to bear the bottom-line cost of problems created by others. In this manner, predatory lending exhibits what my economics training at the University of Chicago would denote as “externalities.” That is a sterile academic term, but the upshot is that predatory lending hurts more than its immediate targets; it assaults the very foundations of stable communities. The damage can take years and years to repair.
The Consumer Bureau was created to ensure that such irresponsible and illegal practices do not continue to plague our lives and our communities. Partnerships like this one are at the heart of our efforts to improve how consumer financial markets work for people. You are on the frontlines, and we are glad to join you there and partner with you as a new federal agency focused exclusively on in consumer financial protection.
We want to know what you are seeing and how that informs what we should be doing – where our supervision and enforcement teams should focus their attention, and what problems our policymakers should undertake to fix. We need to do this work together, and to promote responsible business practices. When honest businesses prosper, communities can flourish and so will America’s economy.
We have already begun our work to enforce the law against unfair, deceptive, and abusive acts or practices. We are launching brand-new federal supervision of payday lenders and debt collectors and credit reporting companies. Because of your close relationship with your constituents, you have a unique ability to help us spread our reach more broadly. By working in partnership, we can succeed in educating, empowering, and protecting our citizens. They deserve to have someone standing on their side. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we look forward to teaming up with you to do just that.
Thank you and next up, I would like to introduce a man who is never afraid to be on the frontlines for the people he represents: your Mayor, Rahm Emanuel.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. For more information, visit www.consumerfinance.gov.