Cooper: Leave state banking laws alone

Roy Cooper says state banking laws should be allowed to work.

In a friend of the court brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, the North Carolina attorney general joined his colleagues from 48 other states to argue that federal laws should not override state consumer protection efforts.

In Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association, the justices are considering whether New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo can enforce fair lending laws against national banks who gave subprime loans.

"Right now, we need all hands on deck to protect consumers from bad loans," Cooper said in a statement. "Irresponsible lending helped get us into this economic mess, and these times call for more oversight and enforcement of tough consumer protection laws, not less."

In the brief, Cooper and the other attorneys general argue that states have "a long track record of consumer protection enforcement" in cases involving national banks and says barring them from those efforts would be "short-sighted."

He specifically cites North Carolina's 1999 anti-predatory lending law, which he sponsored as a state senator, as an example of state efforts that went beyond the federal government's.