Phoenix Management Systems
From:
Jennifer B. Jones, Phoenix Management Systems [mailto:thephoenixx1@rcn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 2:36 PM
To: regs.comments@occ.treas.gov; regs.comments@federalreserve.gov;
Comments; regs.comments@ots.treas.gov
Subject: Comment: Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)
Dear Officials of Federal Bank and Thrift Agencies:
As a concerned citizen and small business owner, I write to urge
you to WITHDRAW the proposed changes to the Community Reinvestment
Act (CRA) regulations.
For more than 25 years, the CRA has encouraged banks to better serve
U.S. communities, resulting in increased access to homeownership,
strengthened economic development in stagnant local economies, and
expansion of small businesses in the nation's minority, immigrant,
and low- and moderate-income communities. Your proposed changes promise
only to halt and even reverse that economic progress.
By empowering
citizens with the tools for close oversight of their local banks,
the CRA
has "completed the market." It has
added millions of community residents to the "eyes and ears" that
the regulatory agencies need for responsible oversight; it has added
stakeholders to stockholders and regulators in the ongoing work of
fine-tuning "financial intermediation" to best serve the
convenience, needs and advancement of the country's local, regional
and national economies.
Yet now you propose to block that citizen oversight of 1,111 banks
that account for more than $387 billion in assets! Those not-so-small
banks may seem small in comparison with the mega-banks, but they
are HUGE to the communities they serve, and those communities deserve
the right to watchdog and, if necessary, to discipline their banks
to fulfill every bank's public obligation to serve ALL of their community,
without unfair exclusion and without predatory practices.
You already have many letters detailing the serious drawbacks of
the proposed Interagency Regulations - drawbacks that promise to
undermine and even cripple efforts to expand fair access to high-quality
financial products and services. I won't reiterate them here, but
instead I will urge you to keep your eye on the goal, a goal that
CRA has served with increasing effectiveness over the past two-and-a-half
decades. That is, to make fair access to capital, credit and banking
services available to everyone, in order to help individuals, families
and communities build assets toward a more prosperous and resilient
economic future.
CRA is a law that makes capitalism work for all Americans. It is
far too vital to be gutted by harmful regulatory changes and neglect.
Thank you for your attention to this critical matter.
Yours truly,,
Jennifer B. Jones
President
Phoenix Management Systems
Chicago, IL 60614
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