Member Corner

Last week Chairman Hensarling and Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee Chairman McHenry sent a letter to Attorney General Holder and Treasury Secretary Lew seeking any and all documents related to the consideration of economic factors in the decision to prosecute large banks for financial crimes. The committee's investigation comes out of Mr. Holder's… Read more »

In January, a federal court held that the Senate was not in recess when President Obama made three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In deeming those appointments unconstitutional, the court invalidated decisions made by the NRLB during the illegal appointments.  While the court ruled only on the NLRB appointments, Richard Cordray, the President's nominee to… Read more »

“We talked about cash on balance sheets not deployed…People just sitting on cash because interest rates are too low and returns are too low now, but they think that they will go up in the future. So, everyone just sits until the Fed takes action. Rather than trying to read the market, they are trying to read what the Fed is going to do - which is… Read more »

Many of the interest groups that directly benefit from large subsidizations in the housing market continue to state that Fannie and Freddie fell victim to the bad private market participants. This suggestion is completely false. It was government housing policy, coupled with loose money from the Federal Reserve, that caused the housing bubble and those are the areas where we must focus reform. Read more »

"I believe… the economic challenges of our nation are fiscal in nature, not monetary. They cannot be solved by the Fed." – Chairman Jeb Hensarling "There seems to be…a lot of evidence out there that the benefits of the low interest rate and quantitative easing are accruing primarily to the federal government, foreign governments and large banks.” – Monetary Policy &… Read more »

On February 14, 2013 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) added the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to its list of government programs identified as “high risk due to their greater vulnerability to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement or the need for transformation”. Read more »

Just one day after the Financial Services Committee held its second hearing in as many weeks on the shaky finances of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced it has added the FHA to its list of “High Risk” government programs. Every two years, GAO identifies programs that are at “high risk due to their greater vulnerability to fraud,… Read more »

The bipartisan JOBS Act, which originated in the Financial Services Committee and was passed by Congress earlier this year, is working to boost the economy.  A report in the Charlotte Observer notes that provisions of the act are helping community banks to trim regulatory costs and save money – money that can be pumped back into local economies, start small businesses and create… Read more »

  Some Washington politicians and supposed media “fact checkers” have been falling over themselves the last few days busily defending the Dodd-Frank Act.  But rather than rely on what the politicians and Beltway pundits think, Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee actually did something quite remarkable by Washington standards:  we asked small town… Read more »

By Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer I was more than a little annoyed recently during a committee hearing with a government official who seemed intent on defending an agency created by the troubling Dodd-Frank Act that is more interested in navel gazing than helping our nation’s small businesses. During the hearing, a leading deputy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP), created… Read more »