Groups Urge President Obama to Support Elizabeth Warren to Head New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Twenty civil and human rights organizations, including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, delivered a letter to President Obama yesterday urging him to appoint Elizabeth Warren to be the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

 The letter states:

“We believe that the clear and best choice to be this first director is Elizabeth Warren.  She has the knowledge, experience, stature, and commitment to make the agency highly effective.  She will bring to the position a lifetime of devotion to protecting the financial well-being of all Americans. “

Warren was the first to envision the CFPB, a new agency created under the recently passed Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to protect consumers from predatory and abusive lending practices.  She is a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School, head of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), and has written books on personal finance for middle-class families.

The Leadership Conference joined with a broad coalition of organizations to ensure that final financial reform legislation included strong protections for consumers and effective regulation to hold Wall Street accountable. The promise of the reforms contained in the law, however, will be determined in large measure by how the regulators flesh out its details.