Meaningful rules in the consumer credit market can accelerate economic recovery. Rules would increase consumer confidence and, more importantly, weed out all the tricks and traps that sap families of billions of dollars annually.

I saw at a young age that one bad break can turn a family's financial life upside down. And it has affected everything in my life since then.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

When you talk about Social Security, it's not just enough to say, we're looking at you, this really matters. It's the fact that a million Americans think it matters. Oh, wait, it's 2 million Americans think it matters. No, it's 4 million Americans. It's 6 million, wait, it's 10 million, it's 50 million Americans who care about this. That's how we're going to make change.

It is critical that the American people, and not just their financial institutions, be represented at the negotiating table.

My advice is to treat [credit cards] like what they are: little plastic grenades that must be handled very carefully.

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.