Michael Barr, Eugene Kimmelman, Elizabeth Warren, as most of you know, was a leading advocate and working with President Obama to establish the CFPB.  She had been named the interim head.  Because of the structure of her appointment, she doesn’t have to be approved so there’s not going to be a political controversy at this point because she is named as an interim director.

 

 

Many of you have probably read her books about consumer credit.  I think these are indicative of some of the things that you might expect from her going forward in terms of consumer advocacy.  I found some interesting quotes from Ms. Warren.  I am going to give those to you.  Here’s the challenge that we face with anything that has ran out of Washington is that I will use a Chinese proverb that I have found, it kinds of speaks to this, “The mountains are high and the emperors far away”, so in order to accomplish some of the things that they like to accomplish, Dodd-Frank, that people are going to understand that the mountains are high and the emperor is very far way.

 

Here are the quotes from Ms. Warren, that I though was interesting.  If you’ve seen her energy this is right out from her lips to God’s ears, the way she feels about some of these things.  She is going to be very direct and that’s probably one of the reasons at this time won’t face Senate confirmation because of her directness, but she certainly isn’t someone who is going see this as a bureaucratic job and an executive position.  She is obviously going to roll her sleeves up and get started right away.

 

Here’s one of the issues that she faces.  I’ve been watching polls like this for a very long time, from my entire career.  I don’t think that I can recall a time when the general confidence in financial institutions has been so low.  This was a study that was conducted by the Associated Press and the National Constitutional Center Poll of just over a thousand adults.  I’ll explain it to you because it’s sort of inversely intuitive here.  The not too confident and not confident at all starts with the small and local business which people have the highest level of confidence in and then it works its way up to banks and financial firms.  52% of those polls where not too confident or not confident at all in banks and financial firms.  Slightly big congress and not by very much and the blogs and citizen’s media as well.  So people are very skeptical at this point.  There’s going to be a lot of “show me how this works”, as we move forward.   Again, it just highlights the fact that Congress, who constructed this Bill, and the target of the Bill are banks of the national institutions, are really kind of at the end of the list.

 

 

Questions

 

Matt, I think that we should be either taking questions or taking a pause here.

 

We are going to open it up for questions.  If you any questions for Louis, please use the chat feature which is found here on the right hand of the screen.  We have some questions come in during the presentation and I want to pose this to kind of get it going, but please we are going to take a little break here for questions so please do submit your questions if you have them for Louis.

 

The legislation is extremely broad gates.  Any success to the examiner, auditor, regulator or enforcement professional get their bearings and know-how to take advantage of the opportunity and what should they be looking for?

 

Certainly, I think there are two or three levels of opportunity here.  You have, for your individual practice, if you have a proprietary business and your operating a small business, I think that there is going to be learning process, a teaching process if you will.  I think that one other thing that comes to mind is that you want to become the go to person for the discussions on how this might impact some of your existing clients, not to mention the clients that you could expand to.  I think that in looking at that slide #9, there is going to be an acronym that we will look at later on called TRACE that we will talk about from the issues that you can use as well, to help your current customers and clients in focusing on the areas that might be more relevant to them.

 

For expansion, I’ve seen law firms beginning to advertise that they want to represent whistleblowers.  I mean, it’s pretty prevalent in the PR market right now, the C firms going out saying that we would like to be your partner in bringing up these issues.

 

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act: The Impact on Regulatory Mandates & Securities Litigation Pt. 4 is brought to you by TASA, leaders in expert witness services for consumer based litigation

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