WASHINGTON – American Consumer and Investor Institute CEO Blaine Luetkemeyer recently sat down with Capitol Account’s Rob Schmidt and Ryan Tracy to talk about what sets ACII apart from other financial trade associations and his plans to fight alongside the Trump administration for pro-innovation policies that put American consumers and investors first. Following are excerpts from the interview:
Capitol Account: What drew you to head up an advocacy group like this?
Luetkemeyer: I think the members want a little more active type of pushback against some of the rules and regulations that have been coming out of Washington. And also to be able to support the new administration and their new rules and regulations.
Capitol Account: ACII describes itself as advocating for more choices for investors and better access to the financial markets. What does that mean?
Luetkemeyer: The theme is to protect consumers and investors, to help them with the freedom of choice and be able to protect innovation…There’s so much new stuff coming along with AI and crypto [and] they’re new financial services tools, or can be. How do you put rules around those? How do you make this all work? … When I was in the House, I served on a couple of the committees that worked on these things, and we were scratching our heads quite frankly. I’m not sure that anybody has the answers yet.
Capitol Account: Trade groups have spent the past four years opposing new rules coming from the Biden regulators. What’s the playbook now for ACII?
Luetkemeyer: We’re going to be probably more of a companion – and a help…We want to be a hand-in-glove type organization with the administration.Capitol Account: How so?Luetkemeyer: When I was in Congress, I’d tell people, don’t bring me your problem, bring your problem with a solution. In the industry you know whether your solution will work, and what the unintended consequences of it are. That’s what our membership will bring…real world perspective.
Capitol Account: Are there regulations you’d like to see rolled back?
Luetkemeyer: With [Rohit] Chopra and the CFPB, we could spend all day talking about those guys – and the SEC and [Gary] Gensler. They’ve been doing all sorts of rogue things for quite some time. The FDIC has been run by – I don’t want to go down the road with [Martin] Gruenberg – but he was a disaster…There are a whole lot of things that, as a result of the lack of leadership in some of these agencies, we want to work with the administration to help clean up. But [we also want] to promote good regulation, smart regulation.
Capitol Account: What does good regulation mean to you?
Luetkemeyer: It’s about providing the guardrails…to keep people in line and make sure the playing field is level – and then let the people play within that field. If there’s something wrong, we go back and tweak it. But otherwise…we shouldn’t be in the middle of this, micromanaging.
Capitol Account: The Trump administration recently issued an executive order that requires independent agencies, like the SEC and the bank regulators, to run their rules through the White House. What do you think?
Luetkemeyer: If you have an independent agency, those people are not accountable to anybody. They’re not elected, they’re just out there. That’s one of the concerns that we should have…It sounds good to have an independent agency, but if there’s nobody over them – holy cow, this is free rein to do whatever you want to do. And we’ve found that many of them will go rogue on us over time. This model doesn’t necessarily work very well.Read the full interview here.
About ACII
ACIl’s mission is to advocate on behalf of American consumers and investors for more choice and access to U.S. financial markets, products and services, including in the areas of consumer banking, securities and cryptocurrencies – all accompanied by robust financial education.
Follow Blaine Luetkemeyer on X @BlaineACII and ACII @ACIIforRetail.