Elizabeth Warren’s attitude toward the free market

What is Elizabeth Warren's attitude toward the "free market"? It's not what it is often portrayed to be, as described by Madonna Gauding of Occasional Planet:

She does not envision new rules and regulations as the main focus of how the CFPB can best protect consumers. Her concern is that they are like “putting down fence posts on the prairie: They can be too easy to run around.” Rather than increased regulation, she wants to make markets for consumer financial products and services work in a fair, transparent, and competitive manner. “That means creating a level playing field where both parties to the transaction understand the terms of the deal, where the price and the risk of products are clear, and where direct comparisons can be made from one product to another.”

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Elizabeth Warren on why we need a consumer agency to protect borrowers

Federal TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren is warning that the Republican proposal for a "consumer protection agency" is anti-family.

"I'm tired of hearing politicians claim to support families and, at the same time, vote with the big banks on the most important financial reform package in generations. I'm deep-down tired of it."
The current Senate bill, sponsored by Democrat Christopher Dodd, which would house the new consumer agency within the Federal Reserve,
adheres to Warren's four tests: a chief appointed by the president, an independent source of funding, the authority to write consumer rules and the ability to enforce them against unscrupulous lenders. The unit, thus, focuses squarely on consumers. Ensuring banks' profitability is left to banking regulators. The Republicans' counter-proposal, released this week, fails all four of Warren's tests.
Warren describes the Republican proposal as follows: ""The whole idea of the substitute is to take a bunch of regulators that already failed and throw them in a committee together."

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Elizabeth Warren: The banks have lobbyists in Washington in numbers that I’ve never before seen . . .

Elizabeth Warren is still fighting a good fight, but Congress continues to side with the big banks, not with consumers. Our representatives, who are inundated with propaganda and money from bank lobbyists, continue to consider the banks to be their clients, not consumers. Warren gives the sad details in this interview with Bill Maher.

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Economic news on the street

Avert your eyes from Wall Street to see what is happening to America. These statistics are part of a terrifying article by Elizabeth Warren, who serves as the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts:

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.
There are many other statistics in this article. For instance, fully employed males haven't seen a pay increase since the 1970's. Warren also presents banks as villains in her story:
Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

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Elizabeth Warren: Nothing much has changed

Elizabeth Warren has lots of bad news, the "stabilized" economy and the huge Wall Street bonuses notwithstanding. Warren is the Chair of the Congressional TARP Oversight Panel. Good for her, hammering on Henry Paulson's enormous bait and switch. Most of that TARP money was supposed to be used for loans for small businesses, not more gambling and bonuses, which is where it appears to have gone. Yet, according to Warren, there will "never" be a meaningful accounting of that money.

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