Member Corner

On Tuesday, Members of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee examined the budget for the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau (CFPB) with the bureau's Chief Financial Officer. While the CFPB generally lacks oversight and accountability, one particular issue of concern raised at the hearing was the outrageously expensive planned renovation of the bureau's Washington… Read more »

Congressman Bill Huizenga joined us to talk about H.R. 1135, the Burdensome Data Collection Relief Act. The bill repeals Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires all publicly traded companies to calculate and disclose the median annual total compensation of all employees and compare that number to the annual total compensation of the CEO in each SEC filing. While that… Read more »

Congressman Robert Hurt introduced two of the bills we considered in today's markup: H.R. 1564, the Audit Integrity and Job Protection Act and H.R. 1105, the Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act. Both were reported favorably by the committee with bipartisan support.    The first bill, H.R. 1564, prohibits the Public Company Accounting… Read more »

Two subcommittee hearings and a full committee markup make for a slightly lighter week than last. Be sure to check back here on the Bottom Line Blog -- and subscribe to our email lists  --  for updates throughout the week. Here’s what’s happening: On Tuesday -- as Rep. Capito previewed in our Sunday Video Message -- the Financial Institutions & Consumer Credit… Read more »

Financial Institutions & Consumer Credit Subcommittee Chairman Shelley Moore Capito delivers this week's Sunday Video Message, the first in our new series. In the video, Rep. Capito previews next week's hearing on the Dodd-Frank Act's negative impact on homeownership.  Read more »

Fortune: The Fed's other trillion dollar problem The amount of money banks have at the Fed recently reached 13 digits, for the first time ever. Bloomberg: New Home Prices Say What’s Different This Time Although no two business cycles are alike, most share some common characteristics. The interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy -- housing and manufacturing -- tend to… Read more »

A survey of housing finance in other countries sheds light on the distortion that government subsidies for housing can cause in national economies. Professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business have pointed out that one thing that Spain and the United States have in common is a “massive misallocation of their economy’s resources to construction. The oversupply is… Read more »

Contrary to the Fannie & Freddie defenders’ assertions that America’s unique GSE-model of housing finance is the “envy of the world,” yesterday’s full committee hearing found that the U.S. ranks only 17th in the world in terms of the rate of homeownership. Our 65% homeownership rate puts us behind Australia, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, all of which provide far less… Read more »

Proponents of the GSE model of housing finance often assert that the costs of that model are justified because it provides benefits that no other countries enjoy. In fact, before the collapse of the GSEs in 2008, their supporters often argued that “American housing finance is the envy of the world.” But the reality is that for all of the resources and subsidies that the GSEs directed (we… Read more »

On Wednesday the House will consider H.R. 1256, the Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act. The Problem: Swaps are uniquely tailored financial products traded globally (cross-border) by a variety of industries to manage risk. Under the Dodd-Frank Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are responsible for regulating swaps trades… Read more »