President Obama defended his proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency in his weekly radio address yesterday, saying it would tamp down the kind of deceptive lending practices and complicated contracts he said often hurt consumers.
Obama proposed the agency as part of his administration's rewrite of rules governing the financial sector. The proposals are now before Congress, and industry lobbyists are pushing back against the proposed agency. They say it would create overlapping layers of regulation and put government in the middle of legitimate business decisions.
Speaking in his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said new regulations are needed to prevent the type of abuses that contributed to the recent financial meltdown. "It's no coincidence that the lack of strong consumer protections led to abuses against consumers," he said. "The lack of rules to stop deceptive lending practices led to abuses against borrowers."
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