It’s “a form of agency leadership that has been shown again and again to produce weak regulation and enforcement at best, and partisan gridlock at worst,” said Jim Lardner of AFR. “The commission idea is being promoted by an alliance of financial industry lobbyists and lawmakers who have been out to undermine the Bureau’s effectiveness ever since they failed to block its creation.”
AFR’s Marcus Stanley: “Why are we thinking that the [financial] industry and the industry lobby knows better than the regulators? To say that Dodd-Frank is some straitjacket ignores the [truth] that regulators have lots of chances to adjust [its implementation].”
“Consumer groups are deeply skeptical of the debate, arguing it is just a talking point for the regional and big banks to weaken Dodd-Frank. ‘It’s basically an attempt to put up a sort of fog of complicated technical terms around industry’s desire to reverse pretty basic financial reforms,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director for public advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. There’s no academic consensus on any single best way to measure [liquidity] … so you can raise it as this boogeyman in a way that is not really particularly connected to the substantive issues.'”
“Bonds seem to trade in smaller transaction sizes than they once did… That is perceived as a sign of illiquidity… A better indication, according to a presentation by Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, would be total trading in the corporate market, which in fact has slightly increased since the financial crisis.”
“‘Fixing much of this could have been done 10 years ago by higher capital requirements, which we failed to do, but we need to move more in that direction,” [Sherrod] Brown, now the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said at a press conference this month with Americans for Financial Reform.'”
“The financial system that pushed the U.S. economy to the edge of collapse in 2008 was a doubly rigged game. It was set up to inflate the profits of banks and insiders twice over—first through products designed to bilk consumers and investors, and second through massive speculation, with taxpayers ultimately paying for the bets that went bad. It was a dishonest system and a dangerous one, and while Dodd-Frank was not a complete fix for either problem, it has made progress on both.”
“Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke about the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in an interview with Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group. ‘David can beat Goliath – that’s the meaning of Dodd-Frank,’ said the senator, who was a founding member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established under the act. ‘We built Dodd-Frank with the biggest, most powerful institutions fighting us every inch of the way.'”
“The lead agency for investor protection isn’t a natural target for the party’s liberal wing… But half of all Americans own some form of stock… More important, the securities industry has insinuated itself into more of American life. Individuals and small business increasingly get loans through the capital markets; our 401(k) plans are based on publicly traded investments… ‘We marketized our retirement system, we marketized our banking system, and the SEC is the main securities regulator,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director for the coalition Americans for Financial Reform.”
“‘A candidate could both support legislative change and tie commitments to that to how they’re thinking about appointments,’ said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. Donner added that it’s also important what kind of economic advisers candidates surround themselves with.”
“‘These students were playing by the rules, sacrificing to get an education and improve their own and their families’ lives,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of groups formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. “They should not be buried in debt for a scam that the Department of Education allowed to continue, even once fraud and abuse were clear.”