Barney Frank Once Answered My Question About Business Loans

Former Congressman Barney Frank has died. He was 86 years-old. While he left Congress in January 2013, his legacy has lived on through the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. Readers may recall that’s the law that gave birth to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and with that a debate that has spanned more than 15 years over how to implement its small business loan data collection mandate.

In any case, I once personally crossed paths with Congressman Frank in a hallway at the Exponential Finance Conference presented by Singularity University and CNBC. It was in 2014 and I had official press credentials. I had limited time so I fired away the first question I could think of and that was “would you be in favor of a federal maximum cap on business loan interest rates?” He said that he would not be.

Talking further about this subject, Frank went on to say that he supported transparency in business loan transactions, such that the borrower should be easily able to identify the terms, but that the premise behind consumer loan protections was that consumers were less sophisticated.

In a second question, I brought up overdraft fees and their tendency to be characterized by critics as short-term loans. Should a loan term of just a single day be required to disclose an annual percentage rate? He believed that they should.

This exchange and a summary of topics discussed at the conference appeared in the July/August 2014 issue of DailyFunder’s periodic trade journal. RIP Congressman Frank.

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.