Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd said Tuesday that he might run out of time to tackle mortgage lending reform this year.
The House passed a sweeping bill last week that Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank predicted would become law this year, but Dodd said Tuesday that this would be a tough timeline for the Senate to fulfill, given other pressing priorities.
"We'll get to that at some point … . I want to deal with it when we can," the Connecticut Democrat told reporters. "We've had a lot on our plate. … I've got a lot to deal with on the committee between now and August."
Dodd said that, after the Senate completes its work on credit card reform, which lawmakers began debating late Monday, the committee must address regulatory reform, possibly breaking off and expediting a bill to give the government power to seize failing large systemic firms.
"I've got the financial modernization issues," he said. "We've got to block out some time for that, not to mention the oversight on Tarp and oversight on things like the stress tests."
Dodd added that, though he wants to ensure the sort of loose mortgage lending that precipitated the financial crisis does not reemerge, it has ceased at the moment.
"That will be a controversial bill. You need time to work that and listen to your colleagues. I'll eventually get there … ; I may have to deal with it in a larger bill. It may be part of the financial modernization piece," he said.
"There isn't a lot of predatory lending going on right now, thank God; there's very little subprime lending … . We certainly want to plug a hole with what happened before, but these other issues I'm grappling with are current issues."
