Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren was a Harvard Law professor specializing in bankruptcy and consumer finance before being appointed to lead the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring TARP. She conceived the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as part of Dodd-Frank and campaigned to lead it, though political opposition led to Richard Cordray's appointment instead. She was elected as a US Senator from Massachusetts in 2012 and has been a persistent voice for stricter financial regulation, student debt reform, and accountability of Wall Street executives for the 2008 crisis. Her academic work on bankruptcy revealed that medical bills were a leading driver of personal bankruptcy in the United States, research that influenced both consumer protection and healthcare reform debates. As a senator, she secured a seat on the Senate Banking Committee and has used her platform to question Federal Reserve nominees, bank executives, and regulators extensively. She authored the CFPB's conceptual design with the explicit goal of creating an agency whose sole mandate was consumer protection — separate from the banking regulators whose primary mission was institutional safety and soundness. She ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, emerging as a leading voice for structural economic reform and financial regulation.