Mark Gongloff: Dodd Frank Act Under Assault Again – Mark Gongloff (Huffington Post)
March 27, 2012

“Amnesia is bipartisan.  The one thing, apparently, that can get Democrats and Republicans working together is a desire to wreck protections for the economy and investors that were put in place not long ago. The House overwhelmingly passed on Tuesday the so-called JOBS Act, which purports to make it easier for small companies to raise money by removing some investor protections put in place after the dot-com bubble and bust and the Enron accounting scandal that occurred just a decade ago. President Obama threw his weight behind the bill, which will mainly provide jobs for criminals, financial journalists and criminologists, Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica and William Black of the University of Missouri have written. …  The House financial services committee is considering a bill, H.R. 3283, that would give banks a massive loophole for gambling with risky derivatives. You know, those things that were at the heart of the financial crisis, which is why we’re having to bother with Dodd-Frank in the first place. H.R. 3283 would let U.S. banks trade derivatives, such as credit default swaps, overseas without having to build up any extra capital to protect against a meltdown in those derivatives. ‘This would create an overwhelming temptation to move swaps business overseas, indeed to the foreign jurisdictions where regulation was most lax compared to the U.S.,’ Americans For Financial Reform, a coalition of labor, consumer and other groups, wrote in a letter to the House today.” Click here for more.