00:00I thank the gentleman for yielding back and as to our Democrat colleagues' concern that this
00:07legislation and allowing for healthy mergers to happen in the banking sector would somehow
00:12diminish financial services or customer service would somehow be lost, it's actually the opposite.
00:19When you have healthy mergers among especially community banks or small regional bank acquiring
00:25a community bank that allows them to add scale, that allows them to invest in the very technology
00:33that provides the customers with better services, with better more innovative financial services
00:39and products.
00:40So far from losing customer service, this is a way for smaller institutions, regional banks
00:47to come together into combinations, invest in more technology to lower costs to help those
00:53customers to increase access to financial services in ways that they can better compete with
00:59the mega banks.
01:00And with that, I reserve my time.
01:02The gentleman in reserves, the gentlelady from California is recognized.
01:07Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker and members.
01:09I yield myself additional time as much as I may need.
01:14When we talk about rubber stamping, oftentimes people don't really know what we're talking
01:22about.
01:23What I'm saying is that we need to have better review.
01:29The OCC needs to be able to do everything possible to ensure that they know what these
01:36big banks are going to do and whether or not they're going to close down branches, whether
01:42or not they're going to lay off people, whether or not people are only going to be able to go
01:48to their telephone or to the internet somehow and try to get someone to talk to.
01:53Let me tell you what a definition of rubber stamping is.
01:59In 2023, the OCC approved, you won't believe this, 22 of 23 mergers within 60 days.
02:10That's 95% done in two months.
02:14Now, that's what you call rubber stamping.
02:16That's what you call the big businesses, big banks, being able to do whatever they want
02:23to do.
02:24All they have to do is get individuals like my friend on the opposite side of the aisle
02:31to stand up and support them with what they want to do.
02:34Again, I'll remind you
02:36that when these big mergers take place, they lay off people and they close down branch banking.
02:43That's why we have what we call deserts that exist in communities.
02:49Deserts because there are no branch banking.
02:52The big boys don't really care about branch banking.
02:57They're big and they are doing exactly what I have indicated in making more money by laying off
03:05more people having less services charging larger interest rates.
03:09I'm not on the side of big banks.
03:11I'm on the side of the people.
03:13And so, let me continue.
03:16The Republicans may claim this bill also prevents the OCC from updating its merger review procedures
03:24in the future.
03:25But why would they want to do that with just one banking agency?
03:28Perhaps they forgot that we have two other banking, federal banking agencies,
03:34in the Federal Reserve and the deposit, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
03:41Not only will this resolution freeze the OCC's review procedures in time and arguably prevent them
03:50from even providing guidance to applicants on how their review procedures work, but it allows other
03:59federal bank regulators, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve to update their procedures.
04:07This would likely lead to regulatory arbitrage where banks seek to merge with banks within a charter
04:15where the primary regulator has the weakest review standards.
04:19In fact, we saw this kind of arbitrage in the lead up to the 2008 global financial crisis,
04:28when the weakest banks would seek to get a charter from the weakest regulator,
04:33the Office of Thrift Supervision, OTS, until their banks failed and Congress shut down the agency in 2008.
04:44So I reserve the balance of my time.
04:46The gentlelady reserves.
04:48It had the title of my ģ¹“ļæ½leo.
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