Last month, Treasury Department Chief Economist Alan Krueger released a sobering statistic: Due to the financial crisis, U.S. household net wealth fell by approximately $17 trillion between 2007 and 2009. Seventeen trillion dollars: That’s nearly $150,000 per household. American people lost homes, pensions, savings, and jobs. The assets and livelihoods of working families became gambling chips for reckless Wall Street bankers. It is time to protect Main Street from Wall Street. It is time for Congress to pass a strong financial reform bill and make sure an economic crisis of such magnitude never happens again.

We are proud that Maine’s congressional delegation supported financial reform and that Senator Snowe and Senator Collins showed leadership in passing the bill in the Senate. As House and Senate lawmakers started to reconcile and merge two versions of the legislation ”“ under the relentless pressure from banking and real estate lobbyists, we urge our legislators to ensure the strength and integrity of the bill for the best interest of American people.

We need a financial reform bill that protects our economy against systemic risks from large financial institutions and their unscrupulous practices. As congressional hearings into Goldman Sachs and others show, Wall Street not only made doomed-to-fail loans but bet they would fail. Wall Street’s business model was to make money creating the loans, and make money when they failed, then collect huge bonuses, leaving taxpayers to pay the piper. Heads they won, tails taxpayers, small businesses and families lost.

No bank should be too large to fail. Large banks must put more of their own money at risk, so that when they run into trouble they’ll have to exhaust their own rainy day fund rather than asking taxpayers for handouts. There need to be strict standards and penalties that discourage excessive and irresponsible growth in size.

Derivative trading, like AIG’s infamous credit default swaps, has enriched a few but endangered the health of the entire financial sector. It must be more transparent and better monitored. Credit rating agencies should also regain their credibility by providing the public with accurate and meaningful risk assessments.

The creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is a key change in the bill. It would consolidate and streamline existing consumer protection authority scattered across many agencies, rendering consumer protection largely ineffective. An independent consumer protection agency would not create bigger government. It would ensure better, more effective and more efficient rule making procedures when addressing problems like abusive credit card/debit card practices and subprime mortgage. The current crisis shows that unfair lending practices, including payday and auto lending, steal families’ hard-earned wages, trap vulnerable citizens in poverty, and subsequently undermine the entire economy.

Maine has led the way with state laws to curb risky lending. Senators Snowe and Collins have held fast to these values by casting critical votes in support of this consumer agency. Some parts of the bill, however, still need clarification to make sure they are effective. For example, an amendment sponsored by Senator Snowe for all the right reasons would, in practice, have unintended consequences. It would let small businesses influence proposed consumer protection rules before the public sees them. We hope this provision will be reworked before final enactment so that small businesses are protected, but bad apples such as foreclosure scam companies, debt settlement companies and payday lenders can’t stall badly needed protections.

With Maine’s unemployment rate hovering above 8 percent and home foreclosure rates continuing to rise, it is clear that Maine people have suffered enough from the consequences of a poorly regulated financial market. The latest Pew polling shows that nearly 70 percent of Maine people now believe that financial reform will “help ensure a stable financial system, help to grow the economy and prevent future job loss,” and 92 percent favor protecting consumers from harmful business practices.

We’ve had the bailouts. Now we need the watchdog. Lawmakers need to take the strongest provisions from the Senate and House bills to produce the best legislation possible. As we cross the finish line, we hope our entire delegation will vote for strong, commonsense reform that benefits Maine and the country.

— Connie Zhu is a policy analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy.