Today, President Obama will sign sweeping credit card reform legislation that will stop credit card companies from abusive practices like raising interest rates at any time and for any reason. Read more about the new credit card protections here.

And on Wednesday, President Obama signed into law two new measures to protect homeowners and consumers. The new laws protecting homeowners and consumers became effective immediately upon receiving the President’s signature.

The first, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act (HFSHA), is an important new tool in fighting illegitimate foreclosures. The second, the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) gives law enforcement greater authority to fight, prevent and deter financial fraud which figured prominently in our national mortgage crisis. Read the White House news release for comprehensive details about what the two new laws will cover.

As our national economy continues to reel from the mortgage meltdown, these new laws are both timely and necessary to get us back on the road to economic recovery.

Consumers Union is especially pleased to see the increased protections related to housing. HFHSA establishes the right of a homeowner to know who owns their mortgage. While the need for a law of this sort might seem ridiculous, the truth is that too many homeowners have had great difficulty determining who owns their loan when their loan is sold or transferred to another. Now their lenders and loan servicers have no excuse for not making this information readily available to homeowners.

HFHSA also establishes important protections for renters living in foreclosed homes. These improvements will help tenants like Eloise Grant whose video story we featured earlier this year. Like millions of tenants who share her plight, Eloise’s story demonstrates the heartache experienced by innocent tenants when their rental home goes into foreclosure through no fault of their own. HFHSA will require that in the event of foreclosure, existing leases for renters are honored. If the rental lease is month-to-month, or owner occupants are foreclosing, tenants must get a minimum of 90 days notice before they will be required to vacate.

The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA) extends federal law enforcement’s ability to protect the public from mortgage fraud by extending federal laws to private mortgage brokers and companies that are not directly regulated or insured by the Federal Government. The Act also authorizes up to $165 million in new resources for the next fiscal year to fund enforcement. This will make it harder for the abusive non-bank lenders to fly under the regulatory radar and escape regulatory oversight, a factor which figured heavily in the mortgage meltdown.

Another noteworthy provision in the FERA is that it will create a bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the types of consumer abuses in the financial services industry the created the mortgage meltdown. As always, it will be interesting to look into the rear-view mirror to dissect all of the parts that contributed to this catastrophe of magnificent proportions. What is truly tragic, however, is that there is no mystery at play here. Consumer advocates have been speaking out for years against the types of abusive practices that contributed in large part to the mortgage meltdown. It’s no surprise that subprime groups and the banks that supported them were able to defeat our efforts over the years. How do you match the need for ethical business practices against the $370 million (as reported on May 6, 2009 by the Financial Times) spent by the subprime lending industry to lobby against increased regulation of their industry? At some point, though, right prevails over might, and those long awaited days of reckoning are finally arriving. It’s time for the financial services Goliaths to move over. The days of “anything goes” and “business as usual” at the public’s expense are coming to an end.

Here’s what ABC News wrote about these new developments.