Senator Judd Gregg says that that Financial Reform Bill is a "Disaster"

He has a very scary discussion about the new Consumer "Protection" Agency here.

Meanwhile, the provision on consumer protection will expand the reach of government and create conflicts with the banking industry, Gregg said.

“You’ll basically have a consumer protection agency which decides to go out and in the morning and say, ‘well everybody who’s XYZ should have a loan, even though the local community bank says XYZ shouldn’t have a loan, because if we give them a loan, we know they’re not going to pay back,’” he said. “It’s going to become an agency that defines lending on social justice purposes instead of safety and soundness purposes.”

Gregg also blasted derivatives language in the bill, saying that it lacks coherence.

“You’ve got this Alice in Wonderland tea party atmosphere around derivatives,” he said. “Basically, the construct is it will make the derivatives in the market less sound, it will cause a huge contraction of credit—maybe up to three-quarters of a trillion dollars—and it will push massive amounts of derivative activity offshore and out of our control. So they will become even less controllable in the sense of having oversight.” . . .