The Business of Law – Marketing and Business for Enterprising Attorneys

Amidst all of the news about the Bear Stearns criminal trial that started last week, we should not lose sight of a different battle brewing on Capitol Hill.

According to the Huffington Post, Wall Street financiers are waging a battle against President Obama’s call for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

From Huffington Post:

“This is a David and Goliath fight,” says Heather Booth, executive director of the Americans for Financial Reform coalition, which includes major labor groups and aims to push for genuine reform. “The biggest banks that created the circumstances that led to greater misery, people losing their jobs and seeing their communities deteriorate, those circumstances have not been changed and there needs to be real reform and structural change.”

The financial crisis and the huge investment losses that it brought about cry out for reform, yet now that some of the dust is settling, and the financial institutions are starting to pay back TARP funds, they are at the same time lobbying against sensible regulations meant to protect consumers.

Meanwhile countless Americans are still trying to recover from huge losses suffered perhaps as the result of incompetence, recklessness, and in some cases, outright fraud.  Of course the consumer financial protection agency should be created, but the broader question is what to do about the victims who suffered these losses.

At Sokolove Law, we’ll be making sure that those victims understand their legal rights, and if they have a case, we’ll be helping them to assert those rights under the law.  The new agency may help going forward, but we still need to look backward and see if we can’t compensate those who have suffered from Wall Street’s greed and recklessness.