Nearly three years after the Dodd-Frank Act, the House Financial Services Committee has approved “a series of bills that could weaken regulation of derivatives — the exotic securities that helped fuel the crisis,” Danielle Douglas reports in the May 8 Washington Post.

The Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act would allow banks to “take exotic swap dealings and put them inside the public safety net, and we could all get stuck bailing these guys out like we did in 2008,” AFR policy director Marcus Stanley is quoted as saying.

Similar legislation passed the House last year only to die in the Senate. While this year’s bills are “likely to face a similar fate,” the article observed, opponents fear that “individual measures could be tucked into broader pieces of legislation that would be difficult to defeat.”

In a cautionary letter to committee chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), Treasury Secretary Jack Lew described the bills as “premature” and potentially “disruptive and harmful to the implementation of key reforms.”

Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, warned against passing “legislation that might tie [regulators’] hands or constrain their ability to respond to evolving markets.”

Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was strongly critical of the Inter-Affiliate Swap Clarification Act, which he characterized as a “wish-list of the financial industry. . . . We’re taking accountability and throwing it out the window,” Lynch said.