Comments Flood In on Volcker Rule – Victoria McGrane (WSJ – subscription required)
February 15, 2012

“The so-called Volcker Rule has broken the record for attracting the most comment letters submitted on any Dodd-Frank proposal. Regulators have received a whopping 17,000-plus comments on the proposal, a Federal Reserve spokeswoman said. And some poor junior-level staffers are still counting them. The rule restricts U.S. banks from making bets with their own money. The vast majority of the letters– more than 16,500 by the Fed’s count — are form letters submitted by individuals urging regulators to stand firm against financial industry attempts to water down the rule, which restricts U.S. banks from making bets with their own money. The regulators aren’t posting all the form letters, but the Fed and others have posted examples. Behind this deluge is a partnership of two consumer advocacy groups that have been active in pushing back against the banks during the Dodd-Frank rule-writing process. Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform used email lists and social media such as Twitter and Facebook to recruit members and others to submit comments on the Volcker Rule. Americans for Financial Reform, for instance, tells visitors to its website to ‘Tell the Financial Regulators: Don’t Let Big Banks Make Taxpayer-Backed Bets.’ That links to a longer article that describes the Volcker Rule as a way to prevent taxpayers from having to bail out financial firms who lose those risky bets, and it provides instructions on how to email in a comment, complete with text they can use or edit to make more personal. Bart Naylor of Public Citizen said that by their internal count their members sent in more than 2,300 ‘tailored’ comments and a total of 15,700 letters overall.” Click here for more.