Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) is practically the poster child for the 2008 financial crisis and shows no signs of having learned his lesson. He’s also reportedly on Donald Trump’s short list for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, which means he could be in line to rank as a top-three cause of the next financial crisis. Check this guy out:
“We still have to remember that millions of people have homeownership opportunities due to a subprime market. I am very leery of any legislation that could undercut that market,” Hensarling said at an October 2007 committee hearing on the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, a bill that would have increased oversight over lenders and loan processors. “We should also take note about what is happening in the marketplace now. The market has a wonderful ability to correct itself.”
No, really, heaven forbid the subprime market would have been reined in before the crash.
He sponsored a 2009 amendment which would have eliminated the Office of Financial Research, a Treasury Department bureau tasked with measuring vulnerabilities across the financial system. That same year, he sponsored a bill to roll back Dodd-Frank requirements that major financial institutions disclose information about executive incentives tied to company performance, in order to weed out arrangements that might encourage risk-taking that could put the institution—and the broader economy—in jeopardy.
And then he became chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which gave him the chance to really go to work, pushing bills to strip protections from vulnerable groups like the military and the elderly, weakening the CFPB’s hold on payday lenders, and more.
Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney has already stocked the CFPB with Hensarling staffers, so if Hensarling is nominated and confirmed, he’d feel right at home there.
Say this, though: When Hensarling or whoever else is ultimately nominated to head the CFPB, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren gets ahold of them, those confirmation hearings are going to be lit.