A Fighting Chance

Meanwhile, the Senate and the House were beginning the heavy-duty work of crafting a bill that would provide the basis for financial reform. The White House was working through its own ideas about reform, but on Capitol Hill, Congressman Barney Frank was in the eye of the hurricane.

I wanted to make my pitch for the consumer agency directly to Congressman Frank, but I dreaded it. I knew he was deeply focused on other parts of financial reform, and I was hesitant to ask him to add the consumer agency to his already heavy burden. Besides, the two of us had met a couple of years earlier, and we’d had a bumpy beginning.

Barney Frank was the gravelly-voiced, smart-as-a-whip congressman who was equally loved and feared in Washington. He was the first member of Congress to come out as gay, and that was back in 1987 when America was a lot less open. I admired his sharp one-liners and his ferocious willingness both to fight for what he believed in and to hammer out compromises that produced half a loaf when most people thought there would be no bread at all. Here was a man who knew how to negotiate.

The congressman represented a portion of Massachusetts that sprawled from the leafy Boston suburbs down to the fishing communities and former factory towns along Buzzards Bay. He had been in Congress for more than twenty years and was now the chairman of the powerful House Committee on Financial Services. When Congressman Frank barked, a lot of people jumped.

The congressman and I were first brought together in 2007 by the Tobin Project, a think tank that put together meetings between academic policy wonks and Washington policy makers. (I was the wonk.) Before the crash, Congressman Frank knew the financial system was crumbling, and he was intensely focused on the need to bring the huge financial institutions—hedge funds, investment banks, giant commercial banks—into a regulatory system that made some sense. The issues were devilishly complex, but Congressman Frank could talk as knowledgeably as any seasoned Wall Street trader about credit swaps or collateralized debt. He was shrewd, he was tough, and he knew what he was talking about.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from arguing with him if I thought he was wrong.

At the meeting in 2007, we duked it out (metaphorically, of course) in front of a roomful of other professors and think-tank leaders. We engaged in a wide-ranging exchange about everything from derivatives and capital reserve requirements to my baby idea for a consumer agency. Underneath all our apparent disagreements, I think we agreed on 95 percent of the substance, but we ordered the priorities for financial reform very differently—and neither of us backed down.

Now it was the spring of 2009. The crash had hit with a vengeance, and the economy was still tumbling. The House would be the first to take up financial reform, which meant that as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Congressman Frank would be the key player in the negotiations involving the new financial rules. He was a champion for the good guys, but a lot was broken, and as he began to sort through the nuts and bolts of reform, he had his hands full with thousands of moving parts. Still, I figured that if the consumer agency had a chance of becoming law, it absolutely had to be part of any package that he moved forward. There wouldn’t be any second chances for the agency.

And that’s how I came to be driving around Newton, Massachusetts, looking for Barney Frank’s apartment, on a Saturday morning in April 2009. The day was lovely, and the road threaded between trees that were just starting to bud. Almost perfect, except that I was lost. (Yes, lost again.) I could see a street sign, but it was nowhere on my printed directions. I didn’t have GPS, so I pulled over and used my own personal help-me-I’m-lost device: I took out my cell phone and called Bruce. I told him the name of the road. He looked at an online map, figured out where I was, and directed me to the congressman’s apartment complex. I parked in an adjacent lot, figuring I was home free.

No such luck.

I saw several modest, two-story brick buildings. They were turned this way and that, with no obvious pattern to the numbering. (Who designs these places?) I was still wandering around when Jim Segel, the congressman’s longtime friend and senior advisor, called out, “Over here!” He laughed as I came up. “This place can be a little confusing.” A little confusing? Yeah, and the Empire State Building was a little tall.

Jim showed me into the congressman’s apartment. It was a small space; on one side of the living area there was a king-size mattress on the floor, complete with a tangle of unmade sheets and blankets. Jim sat down next to a small table in the kitchen part of the room. I said hello to the congressman’s surfer-dude-handsome boyfriend, Jimmy, but before we had a chance to visit, Congressman Frank burst in.