Elizabeth Warren wins another battle in war on Wall Street 30SEP15

LOOK at this picture, +Senator Elizabeth Warren  is walking with +Senator Bernie Sanders , not any of the other Democratic presidential candidates. Yes, this photo is from this Spring, but Sanders was  weighing his options about running even then. Sen Sanders is committed to taking on the bank-financial cabal when he is elected President, and Sen Warren will be a strong ally in the Senate. Check out this article from +The Washington Post on her latest victory against wall street for the American people, and take note this time she took on the Democratic Party establishment, proving she is working for the American people, not her political party and not for the 1%....

Elizabeth Warren wins another battle in war on Wall Street

By James Hohmann and Elise Viebeck September 30 was weighing 

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren walk to the Senate floor after a weekly Democratic caucus lunch this spring. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

THE BIG IDEA: 
— Robert Litan has joined a growing fraternity of powerful Democrats who lost jobs because of Elizabeth Warren. 
Just a few hours after The Daily 202 broke the news that the Massachusetts senator was taking on the Brookings Institution over industry-financed research produced by Litan, the think tank sought and received his resignation. The veteran of the Clinton administration, who directed Brookings’ Economic Studies Program before becoming a non-resident senior fellow, is listed on the think tank’s web site this morning as a “Former Expert.”
Earlier this year, Warren blocked investment banker Antonio Weiss from becoming the third-ranking official at the Treasury Department. In 2013, Warren’s opposition helped torpedo Larry Summers’ lifelong dream of becoming Federal Reserve chairman—despite the fact he was reportedly promised the job by the White House.
Wall Street types call Warren a lot of nasty things, but demagogue is the most printable.
This episode will only embolden the liberal firebrand, who continues to demand answers about the way that financial services companies peddle their influence by paying think tanks and scholars for research papers that support lobbying goals.
And it could have a chilling effect on scholars who have been perfectly fine letting companies that finance their research review it before publication.
Brookings is as much a pillar of the Democratic establishment as any institution in Washington. That President Strobe Talbott moved so quickly to oust Litan underscores just how terrified D.C. elites from both parties are right now about the rise of pitchfork populism.
And for good reason. This week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 56 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they “feel angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington, rather than it working to help everyday people get ahead.” That’s 19 percent higher than among Republicans.
Big picture, Warren has more power in the Senate than as a presidential candidate. While beloved by progressives, she’s actually not very talented at retail politicking. She had a tough time beating Scott Brown in Massachusetts in a presidential year. If she had run for president, maybe she’d be Bernie Sanders right now. But maybe Warren would have fizzled, and she certainly would have faced a blizzard of rough opposition research dumps from Clinton World. The senator is much more effective as a crusader for the liberal conscience in Washington. It’s not clear what her long game is. She’s 66. But, right now, Warren’s got as much juice as ever.

America Needs a President Who Will Confront the Financial Industry's Hegemony Over Our Lives 14JUL11

THANK YOU SHEILA BAIR, we are already missing you! You are quite a lady for sure!!!!
No one in a position of authority in our government today seems to understand fully the threat to American institutions and ideals represented by the untrammeled clout the financial industry now holds permeating the halls of government through the power of influence and money. We are barreling toward a destabilizing schism in our society where one interest group, the finance world and its allies, are running the nation to their own economic benefit, oblivious of the pain and loss being endured by their fellow citizens on the Main Streets of our towns and villages and the neighborhoods and tenements of our cities
Our president, whose objectives are certainly sincere, has surrounded himself with men whose formation and ties run deep into the culture of Wall Street -- be it his Chief of Staff William Daley, formerly Midwest Chairman of JPMorgan Chase; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Former Chair of the New York Fed, or Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and former Goldman Sachs partner -- while consulting freely with Warren Buffet, that champion of and investor in Goldman Sachs. In many ways very little has changed from the previous administration when the Treasury and virtually all government agencies responsible for financial oversight were in some manner beholden to Wall Street houses and banks, and when the crunch came in September 2008 it was their "club" members who were bailed, while the rest of the country sank into a miasma of recession and unemployment. As Sheila Bair was quoted in the New York Times Magazine saying to Joe Nocera: "You know, Wall Street barely missed a beat with their bonuses. Isn't that ridiculous?"
Nor has their been a serious effort made by prosecutors in the Obama administration and its agencies to hold individuals responsible nor to claw-back the billions of dollars paid out as bonuses for phony profits that were booked by creating and marketing fundamentally flawed financial instruments such as the now notorious C.D.O.'s. The Justice Department opted for a policy known as 'deferred prosecutions'. The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency all too often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return the government would enter agreements to delay or cancel prosecution if companies promised to change their behavior -- in other words, no punishment and little assurance that it wouldn't happen again.
Yet there was one player in government, that progressively rare breed, a moderate republican appointee holdover from the Bush Administration, who fought tooth and nail against the clubhouse fraternity that had taken over the fiscal soul of the nation. She was unflinching in defending the interests of the nation's citizens, becoming an equal opportunity irritant to Democrat and Republican alike. And she knew what she was talking about.
I personally have had the good fortune of hearing her speak at an Aspen Ideas Festival event just over a week ago. She was lucid, forthright, without hyperbole conveying a sense of reasoned indignation felt by too many of us, at the unfairness of the present structure. Where we, as citizens seem unable through our elected officials to stem the influence, the systematic 'heads I win, tails you lose' construct of our financial institutions and their growing impact on the functioning of our society.
Upon her retirement as Chairman of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) this July 8th Sheila Bair received this accolade from the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Salomon: "Sheila Bair, who is stepping down as Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. this week, leaves behind an agency transformed from a sleepy bank overseer into a financial regulatory powerhouse focused on preventing another financial crisis." The article goes on to report that at her last FDIC meeting the agency finalized a rule allowing the government to recover compensation from executives responsible for a financial firm's collapse. Only someone with the gumption of Bair could have achieved such a result given the opposition massed against her.
In an in-depth article by Joe Nocera, Nocera writes that Bair began sounding the alarm about the dangers posed by the explosive growth of subprime mortgage rates in June 2006. At the time, "Bair insisted that she and her agency have a seat at the table and fought Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, the President of the New York Federal Reserve, as they tried to cobble together solutions that would keep the financial world from going off a cliff: She and the F.D.I.C. managed a number of huge failing institutions during the crisis including Indy Mac, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual."
Of particular significance was Bair's belief in market discipline where, according to Nocera, she found herself at variance with Obama's Treasury Department, meaning she held that shareholders and debt holders should take losses ahead of depositors and taxpayers. "She was tough-minded and straight-forward." And as she would be quoted, "Our job is to protect bank customers, not banks."
She fought for increasing the capital requirements for banks in the face of banks who lobbied strenuously against her. Lower capital requirements allow for more risk, ergo larger bonuses. She fought against the United States' adoption of the bank boondoggle called Basel II which would have lowered bank capital requirements and worse, self selection of risk models thereby significantly exposing the system to even greater bank failures. Nocera would declare "I've long believed her opposition to Basel II has been a hugely underappreciated factor in helping to save the financial system when the crisis came."
And on it went. Geithner, in full Wall Street mode, wanted the F.D.I.C. to guarantee all debt issued by bank-holding companies (such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley). Sheila Bair said NO!
To Bair, her fight with the Treasury and the federal Reserve was ultimately about the bondholders. According to Bair "They did not want to impose losses on bondholders and we did...there is no insurance premium on bondholders... For the little guy on Main Street who has bank deposits, we charge the banks a premium for that, and it gets passed along to the customer. We don't have the same thing for bondholders, they're supposed to take losses."
And, most tellingly, she was clear in her displeasure that the government, by acting as if it was no one's fault, placed no responsibility where it should have been placed. For the many of us who have been wondering the same thing, what a breath of fresh air.
She has a stalwart fighter for mortgage modifications that would truly help homeowners. As Nocera explains that "what particularly galls her is that the Treasury under both Paulson and Geithner has been willing to take all sorts of criticism to help the banks. But it has been utterly unwilling to take any political heat to help homeowners."
All the while the Dodd-Frank Bill meant to prevent the too big to fail syndrome from ever rearing its head again, thereby making the largest banks accountable for their actions, is being lobbied into impotence by the financial brotherhood.
Here we have Sheila Bair, Kansas transplant to Washington, taking on the behemoths of the financial world, dogged in her defiance, "We always saw ourselves as the champion of the little guy. The other regulators never saw a bank closure, because that was our role. We were the ones that saw people losing their jobs when we had to shut down a little bank. They never understood the unfairness of the way little banks were treated versus the big banks...I've always thought that it was really important for everybody to have to play by the same set of rules."
Given the financial crisis in which our nation finds itself -- given the access and the power of the financial intuitions' hold, enabling them to play events to come to their own advantage -- would it not be better to have one of our own in the White House who understands the game? Who is on our side, and by virtue of her position and knowledge can stare down all the entreaties for special treatment because she inherently understands that this nation cannot flourish, nor overcome the obstacles that lie ahead and maintain its dignity if we do not all together play by the same set of rules?
Sheila Bair may not know it yet, but we need not only her kind, we need her to become our president. Her persona, her values, her experience would be a rare and welcome gift to the nation!

AP Source: Consumer Advocate Tapped For New Post 15SEP10

WHAT he really needs to do is appoint her to head the bureau and accept nothing but her approval from the Senate! 
President Obama will appoint Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren as a special adviser to oversee the creation of a new consumer protection bureau, a Democratic official said Wednesday.
Warren would report to both the Treasury Department and the White House in a role that would not require Senate confirmation. The 61-year-old Harvard University professor had been considered the leading candidate to head the bureau itself, but her lack of support in the financial community could have set the stage for contentious Senate hearings that may have ultimately derailed her confirmation.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak ahead of the formal announcement.
The independent consumer bureau was created under the financial regulatory bill Obama signed into law earlier this year. It will have vast powers to enforce regulations covering mortgages, credit cards and other financial products, and be financed by the Federal Reserve.
Warren has served as head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring Treasury's handling of the $700 billion bank rescue fund known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. She has at times clashed with Treasury over her committee's findings and conclusions about the use of TARP money.
As of Sept. 10, however, Warren has removed herself from the panel's work, a signal that the new Treasury post was a possibility.
He pending appointment was first reported by ABC News.
The financial regulation law gives Treasury the authority to run the consumer protection bureau while the nomination of its director is pending.
It was unclear whether Obama also intends to nominate a permanent director for the job this week.
Others mentioned as contenders to lead the agency are Michael Barr, an assistant treasury secretary who was a key architect of the administration's financial regulatory plans, and Eugene Kimmelman, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's antitrust division.

Elizabeth Warren or Bust! from MOJO 18AUG10

THE government may be on vacation but the fight is still on to make sure Elizabeth Warren is the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau....this is from Mother Jones, strengthening the case for her appointment and approval. There are many post on this blog about Elizabeth Warren, do a search to find them to learn more about her work and why she needs to head this agency.

Elizabeth Warren or Bust!

I've been out of Washington for a little while—escaping the heat and the disheartening politics. I've even managed to go for more than a week without tweeting (with a few lapses). But it's hard to escape people who want to talk about what's happening back within the Beltway. What's edifying is discovering what folks outside Washington focus on.

Those of us who follow politics and policy for a living often have numerous matters on our to-watch lists. People outside the politerati usually have a truncated list, and often imbue a particular issue or controversy with special significance. A highly unscientific survey—based on comments made to me by highly-educated, self-identified, vacationing liberals who feel let down by President Barack Obama—shows that a top priority for Obama's base these days is Elizabeth Warren.

Can DC's top bailout cop beat the finance lobby—and Larry Summers?

— By David Corn

November/December 2009 Issue

BY HER OWN reckoning, Elizabeth Warren had two transformative experiences on the way to becoming official Washington's most unconventional expert on the financial industry. Let's start with the second. It was 2003, and Warren, an earnest-sounding and ever enthusiastic Harvard law professor who specializes in bankruptcy, was on the set of Dr. Phil. She had written a book with her daughter called The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, and she'd expected to sit next to the host and explain its key points. Instead, Dr. Phil was interviewing a stressed-out couple with serious medical and financial troubles. After they mentioned they had obtained a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, the lights went up on Warren, and Dr. Phil asked her if this had been a smart step. No, she declared, because now they could lose their home if they defaulted.
As soon as her turn was over, Warren found herself thinking, "You've been doing this work for 20 years now, and it is unlikely that any of it has had as direct an impact as these 45 seconds." She had reached millions, some of whom might actually pay attention to her advice. "So here you are, Miss Fancy-Pants Professor at Harvard. What do you plan to do now? Is it all about writing more academic articles, or is it about making a difference for the families you study? I made a decision right then: It was for the families, not the self-aggrandizement of scholarship."

Six years later, Warren is applying that people-first philosophy by simultaneously running the Congressional Oversight Panel, which monitors the $700 billion TARP bailout program on behalf of the taxpayers, and pushing for a new agency to protect consumers from predatory lenders. Now, as Congress seriously considers her proposal (and lobbyists maneuver to kill it), the question is: Can a middle-class populist in Ivy League garb change the world—or at least Big Finance?
Warren, 60, grew up in Oklahoma in what she terms "modest circumstances." Her father was a maintenance man; her mother worked for Sears. After graduating early from high school, she headed to college on a debate scholarship. Eventually she landed at Rutgers' law school, where she admits starting out somewhat clueless: When a fellow student asked if she would try out for the law review, she didn't know if he meant a magazine or a theatrical show. "All I knew was, if the smart kids were doing it, count me in."
She graduated in 1976, with no job lined up and nine months pregnant with her second child. Soon she'd started her own practice, handling wills, real estate closings, and the like. Later she taught nights at Rutgers, and then found a position at the University of Houston's law school—one of the first women ever hired there, she says, and the first who was not married to a faculty member. She began teaching bankruptcy law. "Bankruptcy," she says, "is about economic death and rebirth, a story of failure but survival, how people come back, how businesses come back. It's an American story."
It was around this time that Warren had her other epiphany. Conventional wisdom held that bankruptcy law was too friendly to debtors, and she shared that view. So she teamed up with two other academics to conduct research that, she thought, "would expose those crafty debtors exploiting loopholes in the law." To her surprise, the study—one of the largest of its kind—demonstrated that most bankruptcies were filed by struggling workers dealing with the loss of a job, a medical problem, or a family breakup. "It changed my vision not only of the bankruptcy system, but of the American economy," she says. "It put me face-to-face with hundreds of thousands of people who worked hard and played by the rules, but a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a spouse who ran off had left them in economic shambles." From that point on, Warren focused on how financial policy and law affected folks at the kitchen-table level, and by 2005 she was testifying on the Hill against legislation sought by credit card companies and the financial sector—and eventually passed by Congress—that made it tougher to file for bankruptcy.
Her passionate advocacy for family-friendly economic policies caught the eye of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who'd disagreed with her on the bankruptcy bill. "He was struck by her articulate views on pro-consumer issues," a spokesman says, and so, last November, Reid appointed Warren to the TARP panel.
Shuttling between Cambridge and the panel's offices in DC—tucked away in a corner of the Government Printing Office—Warren broke the mold of the typical government commission. Instead of endlessly studying the issue before producing a bland, predictable doorstop of a report, the panel would publish a to-the-point, easy-to-comprehend assessment of a different slice of TARP each month. One of the reports revealed that the Treasury Department had paid $78 billion more than market value for the assets it purchased from banks. Another said that despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the bailouts, the financial system is still polluted by toxic assets that could trigger another meltdown. And the September report found that taxpayers might not recover up to $23 billion in TARP funds doled out to Chrysler and GM. Warren herself has done her part to publicize her panel's work, delivering testimony to Congress and appearing widely in the media (on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart inquired whether she had "powers to crush" companies that had gotten sweetheart deals from TARP), often bluntly taking Treasury to task for failing to make its programs transparent. At one point she told lawmakers that "Congress and the American public have no clear answer" from Treasury regarding its overall TARP strategy.
"She's done a great job calling attention to the Treasury's failing in ensuring that the taxpayers get a fair deal," says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That really is extraordinary in DC." Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remarks, "What she is doing is making a lot of people very uncomfortable."
Indeed. In April, Thomas Cooley, a Forbes columnist, blasted Warren for politicizing the oversight panel to advance an anti-bank agenda, and one of the five-person panel's two Republican members, Jeb Hensarling, has criticized her for focusing the commission's work "on issues not central to our mandate." He also pushed for releasing the transcripts of the panel's private meetings, a move that Warren resisted because, a spokesman says, the members need to have "candid discussions" about their ongoing investigations.
Beyond monitoring how the government is mopping up after the financial crisis, Warren is pushing a proposal that could help prevent the next one: creating a Financial Product Safety Commission to protect consumers from abusive lenders. Mortgages and credit cards, she wrote in a 2007 journal article about the proposal, "should be subject to the same routine safety screening that now governs the sale of every toaster, washing machine, and child's car seat."
Straightforward as that sounds, it would represent a fundamental shift. "Regulating financial products based on fairness, simplicity, and appropriate risk is an entirely new paradigm," notes Reid Cramer, director of the New America Foundation's asset building program. In the wake of the financial meltdown, the idea has gained traction in Washington, thanks in part to Warren's plainspoken advocacy. "Almost unique among people with deep financial insight, Professor Warren speaks a language that ordinary people can easily comprehend," says Laurence Tribe, a colleague at Harvard Law. For example, when testifying before a congressional committee in June, Warren summed up the shift in banking this way: "Today's business model is about making money through tricks and traps."
Warren's proposal, of course, terrifies the finance industry, and with the White House vowing to push for it and Congress expected to start hammering out legislation, lobbyists have been preparing for battle. The American Bankers Association has proclaimed its opposition. Bill Himpler, executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, says Warren's commission would "take us essentially back to the 1970s, where we had double-digit interest rates...and one-third the consumer credit available that we have now." Earlier this year, the Republicans on the Congressional Oversight Panel, Hensarling and former Sen. John Sununu, dissented from a panel report that called for the new watchdog, arguing that it "could well undermine the health of banks." In June, financial policy analyst Jaret Seiberg said that the industry's worst nightmare is that should Congress create such an agency, Warren would run it.
Does she want the position? "I have a job I love," she says. And while Warren would be a natural choice, she may not be a shoo-in. One senior Obama economic adviser told me that Lawrence Summers, the national economic adviser, "has a thing about her"—meaning he's not a fan. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Summers.) For her part, Warren says that she and Summers are friends, and a source familiar with their relationship characterizes them as sparring partners. "They're like two tennis players at Wimbledon: energetic, uncompromising. But they're adversaries, not enemies. When they put down the tennis rackets, they can still go out for a drink."
But a Warren colleague at Harvard (who admires her) notes that Summers—who as Harvard president speculated that women may not have the same innate math and science ability as men—might share the sentiments of fellow Harvard economists who dismiss Warren as insufficiently theoretical. "They think she shouldn't be talking about bankruptcy except as someone in the economics department would—that is, with formulas and theorems, not about how it affects real people." In Washington, though, that skill—explaining how grand financial concepts affect real-world families—may prove Warren's greatest asset. As she once put it on The Rachel Maddow Show, her rule for financial products is very basic: "If you can't explain it so the person on the other side can understand it, then you shouldn't sell it to them."

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.

If You Liked This, You Might Also Like...

• Meet the Taxpayers' $3 Trillion Watchdog

  The bailout buck stops with Neil Barofsky.

• Tell Us How You Really Feel, Elizabeth Warren

• Six Ways the Financial Bailout Scams Taxpayers

  The biggest loser of the financial bailout is indisputably the American taxpayer.

ELIZABETH WARREN DESERVES TO HEAD THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU BECAUSE Tim Geithner Opposes Nominating Elizabeth Warren To Lead New Consumer Agency 15JUL10

BE SURE TO WATCH THE VIDEO 'ELIZABETH MAKES TIMMY SQUIRM' AT THE END OF THE POST.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed opposition to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a source with knowledge of Geithner's views.
The financial reform bill passed by the Senate on Thursday mandates the creation of a new federal entity charged with protecting consumers from predatory lenders.
But if Geithner has his way, the most prominent advocate for creating the agency may not be picked to lead it.
Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School whose 2007 journal article advocating the creation of such an agency inspired policymakers to enact it into law, has rocketed to prominence since the onset of the financial crisis as one of the leading reform advocates fighting on behalf of American taxpayers.
Warren has been an aggressive proponent for the bureau in public and behind the scenes, working regularly with President Barack Obama's top advisers and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Since 2008, she has overseen the Congressional Oversight Panel, a bailout watchdog created to keep tabs on how two administrations spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street while struggling to keep distressed homeowners out of foreclosure and small businesses from collapsing.
Yet while her work on behalf of a federal unit designed solely to protect borrowers from abusive lenders has been embraced by the administration, Warren's role as a bailout watchdog led to strained relations with the agency her panel has taken to task with brutal reports every month since Obama took office: Geithner's Treasury Department.
It's no secret the watchdog and the Treasury Secretary have had a tenuous relationship. Geithner's critics have enjoyed watching Warren question him during his four appearances before her panel. Her tough, probing questions on the Wall Street bailout and his role in it -- often delivered with a smile -- are featured on YouTube. One video is headlined "Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm."
While her grilling of Geithner in September, over what members of Congress have called the "backdoor bailout" of Wall Street through AIG, inspired the "squirm" video, just last month Warren pressed Geithner on the administration's lackluster foreclosure-prevention plan, Making Home Affordable. Criticizing him for Treasury's failure to keep families in their homes, she questioned Treasury's commitment to homeowners.
Warren's persistent oversight is part of the reason for Geithner's opposition, according to the source.
In addition, her increasing public profile could make it difficult for Geithner, who will oversee the unit until it's transferred to the Federal Reserve. His role would involve trying to balance her advocacy on behalf of borrowers with the demands of the nation's major financial institutions, his traditional constituency.
Geithner's objections to Warren taking over that role also involve her views on Wall Street, sources say. The longtime professor believes the nation's megabanks are Too Big To Fail and have been among the biggest abusive lenders in the country. Her toughness on giant banks is said to be a longtime source of tension with Geithner.
Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, is also said to have a strained relationship with Warren, though his stance on her nomination is not known.
Democrats in Congress have been among her most enthusiastic supporters. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank is one of many influential members who hope she'll get the nod.
And while labor and consumer groups often butted heads with Geithner on various aspects of the financial reform legislation, they have lauded his support for strong consumer protections. Warren, however, has been referred to as a "rock star" among consumer advocates. Many have told HuffPost they're hoping Obama picks her to head the new bureau.
Geithner's opposition could have political implications for a White House determined to prove it's gotten tough on Wall Street. Since March, Obama has devoted four of his weekly Saturday addresses to highlight and promote the consumer agency.
In March 2009, in response to a question during a town hall event in Southern California about the bailout for Wall Street firms and whether Obama supported tougher consumer protections on credit cards, Obama promoted Warren's academic work:
"The truth of the matter is that the banking industry has used credit cards and pushed credit cards on consumers in ways that have been very damaging," Obama said according to a transcript. "There's a woman named Elizabeth Warren who's a professor at Harvard who did a great deal of study around this. And she made a simple point. You know, if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your face, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would protect you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your face, that starts off at zero-percent interest, and once they kind of suck in the -- buying a bunch of stuff and suddenly it's 29 percent; and if you're late two days, suddenly, you know, you just paid another $30, and all kinds of fine print that a lot of folks didn't understand -- well, somehow that's okay.
"I think generally having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is important," Obama added.
Three months later, the administration released its blueprint for how it wanted to fix the nation's broken financial system. Warren's idea for a consumer agency was a heavily-promoted part of it.
Warren, a Treasury Department spokesman and a White House spokesperson all declined to comment for this article.