May 27, 2011
The same thing can often be perceived very differently by two parties. Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for example. GOP lawmakers would probably liken it a bullet train, racing at a nearly reckless speed toward its destination of over-arching regulatory reform. Yet to Elizabeth Warren, the special Treasury Department adviser who has been helping to set up the CFPB ahead of its official opening in July, the agency is more like the Little Engine That Could.
“To Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration advisor helping launch the bureau, it’s just ‘a little government agency’ with a big mission,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
The remarks came as part of Warren’s commencement address Friday at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, N.J, where she received her degree in 1976.
“This little government agency has the opportunity to make consumer financial markets work better for families, better for responsible lenders, and better for the economy as a whole,” said Warren, who today is a law professor at Harvard University. “This agency is built on the faith that when the rules are fair, when anyone can see prices and risks up front and when fine print can’t be used to hide nasty surprises, then we have the chance to build stronger families and a stronger America.”
She also recalled during the speech that the economy “came crashing down” in September 2008, the year the graduates had entered law school. As she works to open the CFPB, Warren stated that she felt the nation was at a crossroad.
“Some people are satisfied with the idea that the world has changed and now it is simply a more dangerous place, with a few big-time winners and all the rest of us left hanging around the margins, hoping for the best and fearing the worst,” she said. “Others see it differently. We believe that change is possible and that, working together, we can do better — better for ourselves and better for our country.”
Click here to read further coverage of Warren’s Rutgers commencement address.
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