 Welcome to the University of Michigan's Ford School and CFLP Conference on Consumer Protection in an Age of Uncertainty. For those of you who have not met me before, I'm Michael Barr, I'm the Dean here at the Ford School of Public Policy. Welcome to those of you who are listening online as well. And we look forward to a great conversation today. What I hope we're going to do over the next two days is really have a look back at where we've been in consumer protection over the last decade, and hopefully also a look forward over the next 10 years where we'd like to be in a world where we can build a better set of consumer protections going forward. If you think back 10 years ago when President Obama came into office, our financial markets were frozen, the country was losing jobs, we were facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the end of 2008, the beginning of 2009, our nation was losing 800,000 jobs a month, which was just devastating to businesses, to workers, to families, to households all over the country. Many of us who are here over the next two days were in government together in 2009 and 2010, and we were focused not only on trying to repair the economy, but also on the urgent obligation to fix the failures in the financial system that helped trigger the crisis in the first place. The failures that led to that crisis had many causes. Regulators, as we're going to hear, were not really protecting consumers or investors. Households and firms took on risks they didn't understand. Legal loopholes and regulatory gaps allowed large parts of the financial sector and markets to really avoid the kind of oversight and transparency and restraint that was needed. There wasn't enough capital in the financial system to protect against losses. In many ways, we tried to address all those concerns to the best of our ability in the Dodd-Frank Act, and I think it did provide in many ways a strong foundation to build a more stable and resilient financial system. One that protects consumers and investors, that rewards innovation, that is able to adapt and evolve with changes in the financial market. I think, however, that that foundation is at extreme risk today. As many of the reforms put in place in the wake of the last financial crisis are being eroded, and new risks are emerging that are going unaddressed. So we're here to really take stock of what has been accomplished so far, what work is still left to do, what progress is being stymied, what repairs will be needed in the future, and hopefully also what bold new ideas we should pursue in a new landscape. For the nearly one in seven Americans who live in poverty or the millions of Americans who fear falling out of the middle class, these families were really ill-prepared to handle the shock of the deep recession. They had little or no savings to fall back on and stood, one medical emergency or one major unexpected car malfunction away from a personal economic crisis. They had no financial slack. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, families found themselves over-leveraged and under-resourced. The federal government in many ways helped cushion that impact, but the household still faced huge setbacks, and for many of these families they have not fully recovered from that crisis 10 years ago. What these families were and are now seeking is some measure, I think, of financial stability. Going forward, American families will undoubtedly need to try and save a larger share of income and borrow more responsibly, but households should not be left on their own to navigate a financial system that has become increasingly detached from their everyday needs. One of the critical ways we can help promote economic security is by making consumer financial markets work better for American families. Low and moderate-income individuals often lack access to basic financial services that could help them cope better with a lack of financial slack in their lives. Facing serious economic and structural constraints, these households turned to a variety of formal and informal institutions to meet their financial services' needs, to receive their income to pay their bills, to borrow and to save. But the way our financial system is structured often makes transacting, saving, and borrowing more expensive and less useful for the families who need it the most. So at this conference, we're going to be talking a lot about financial access. We'll also be spending a lot of time talking about the CFPB. Those of you who are familiar with this landscape know that in the lead up to the crisis, our financial system was largely incapable of supporting a successful regulatory structure for consumer protection. Fragmentation of rule-writing supervision and enforcement made it impossible to create a comprehensive and well-calibrated consumer protection system. Jurisdiction and authority for consumer protection was spread over many federal regulators, all of whom had higher priorities than protecting consumers. Banks could choose the least restrictive supervisor among many providers, many different banking agencies, and a large number of non-bank providers from home-mortgage originators to payday lenders escaped any meaningful supervision completely. With the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we had a chance and still have a chance to do more than play catch-up in regulating consumer financial markets. The Bureau provided a historic opportunity to build a successful regulatory structure for consumer protection, one that is designed to promote financial inclusion, preserve consumer choice, provide for more efficient and innovative markets for consumer financial markets. But a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau provided for the first time a consumer agency with a necessary mission focus, market-wide coverage, and consolidated authority. As we'll hear from many of our speakers under Elizabeth Warren, under Rich Cordray, under many of the speakers who are here today, the CFPB got a lot done. With new oversight of mortgages, payday lending, prepaid cards, credit cards, arbitration clauses and the like, and tough enforcement that brought in $12 billion in fees and restitution. But today, much of that work is at risk. Reforms in some respects have been weakened, and there's a real concern about the direction of the agency today. We'll have several panels focused on the CFPB's past and future, as well as on the key consumer finance markets and how to make progress. We're also going to be talking about investor protection. There are a host of issues here, from reforms in the mortgage markets to cleaning up derivative rules. But we thought we'd focus today and tomorrow on one particular long-standing problem, advice provided to investors by their brokers. We'll also be hearing a lot about student loans, and issues which are really issues near and dear to many of our students and many others in the audience. What protections have worked, what crises lie ahead, and what can we do to reduce the risk of them going forward? The financial crisis led to fundamental reforms of our financial system, but the process of reform is not over. American families can ill afford a financial system that imposes unnecessary costs, confusion, and complications on their daily lives. Our country must take the steps necessary to ensure that the financial system works better for everyone, and this conference will help us move these issues forward. I'm thrilled to welcome so many distinguished speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including many old friends. We have an outstanding group of speakers and panelists joining us over the next two days, academic experts and leaders from disciplines, market makers, policy makers, rule enforcers, what John Lewis would call people who make good trouble. And I'm also especially delighted to thank our keynote speakers, founding CFPB director Rich Cordray, who we'll hear from over lunch, and Rohit Chopra of the FTC. Our speakers will take up a wide variety of issues over the next two days. I'm really happy to welcome you here, but before we get underway, I want to talk a little bit about some logistics for the next couple of days. We're going to stay in this room for the keynote and panel discussions with coffee and snack breaks out in the Great Hall outside these doors. At the end of each keynote or panel conversation, we're going to open the floor to questions. We're video recording today's conference, and we'll be live streaming it as well. Welcome to those of you who are watching online. Let me just say, for those of you who are here but haven't registered, if you wouldn't mind in the coffee break, going out and registering so that we can keep in touch with you and you can get access to the materials that come out of the next couple of days of discussion. Our keynote speaker, Rich Cordray, is going to speak at lunch, as I mentioned. So when lunchtime comes, we're going to ask you to move out to the Great Hall pretty quickly, bring your lunch back in pretty quickly, and sit here and eat in the Annenberg Auditorium so we can have the full amount of time with Rich. Those of you who are sitting in the back rows, you'll see little table tops you can pull up so you don't need to eat on your lap. Those of you in the front, you can certainly move to the front if you're sitting in the back, as I always tell my students. But please get organized quickly over lunch. Restrooms are out the door to the right and around the corner near the elevators. Those should be easy to find. Lastly, I have quite a number of thank yous to give because an event like this takes quite a number of people to pull off. Let me start by thanking all of the speakers, all of you who are sharing your time and expertise with us today. The Center on Finance Law and Policy is working with the Ford School of Public Policy on this event, so I'm thankful to myself for cosponsoring the event. I want to thank a number of our student groups who are working with us, Affordable Michigan, the Bankruptcy Law Society, the Business Law Association, the Consumer Advocacy and Financial Regulation Organization, and Michigan Fintech. You'll see many students over the next couple of days. Let me thank, in particular, the Center on Finance Law and Policy staff. I'm Christy Baer, who you've been corresponding with, and Tracy Van Duessen, who you've been connecting with as well. I think it's still out in the hallway. They do extraordinary work to make this event happen. I also want to thank Ford School staff who are working with us in addition to their day jobs helping out with this conference. Tom Cook, Bill Kelly, Eric Vandenviter, Maryam Negarim, Bonnie Roberts, C.U. Nitzos, Damien Swach, Susanna Wisely, and Islam Mubarak. I also want to thank the Ford School Communications team, Laura Lee, Katherine Carver, Chris Myers, Becky Mullen, Aaron Flores, and Nick Faust. We also would like to thank financial supporters of the CFLP in this conference, University of Michigan Alumni Paul Lee, John Loomis, and Bill Marqueau. Let me also thank all of the CFLP's research assistants, especially Mitri and Anathrom, Elizabeth Felbrugge, Graves Lee, Abigail DeHart, and Aviv Halpern, who worked on this conference. Finally, thanks to all of you for being here today. I'm looking forward to the conversations to come. And with that, I've waited long enough for Lisa to arrive, and we can start the first panel. One of the great things you learn as faculty members, you can shorten or stretch out your marks to any length needed for the occasion. So I'm really delighted to welcome our first panel this morning, and I'm going to turn things over to Eric to get us started.