“’The House is the odd man out in terms of doing Wall Street’s bidding,” says AFR policy director Marcus Stanley. “They’re letting Wall Street write the law to its own benefit in ways that harm the public.”
“The giant financial institutions at the center of the economy are larger than ever, and still combine economically critical payment functions with complex and murky trading and brokerage activities.”
Congress will soon be back from recess – and back to gnashing its teeth over the budget and the various important things that, too many in that branch of government now contend, our country can no longer afford to do. They could expand their sense of the possible by considering a source of revenue they have so far largely ignored – a small tax on sales of stocks, bonds, and complex financial instruments.
President Obama urged the nation’s top financial regulators on Monday to move faster on new rules for Wall Street, telling them in a private White House meeting that they must work to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.
The banks did not get everything they wanted, according to Forbes. But, in AFR’s words, their foreign subsidiaries “will still be permitted to escape Dodd-Frank jurisdiction… for an inappropriately broad range of transactions.”
“The progress of the CFPB has been the most impressive” result, said AFR Policy Director Marcus Stanley. “In 2009, very few people would have predicted that a few years later there would be a fully operational and independent consumer financial protection bureau.”
With the confirmation battle ended, the Columbus Dispatch paused to reflect on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s accomplishments. “It’s off to a really good start,” AFR’s Lisa Donner told the Dispatch’s Jessica Wehrman. “But there’s a whole lot of work left to be done.”
By 71 to 29, the Senate has agreed to end debate and allow a vote on the nomination of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That vote “will remove the threat of legal challenges to the bureau’s rules and enforcement actions,” Bloomberg reports.
Three years after Dodd-Frank, the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to write a rule implementing “one of the simpler parts of a mammoth and complicated law.” The Washington Post explores the reasons.
CFTC chairman Gary Gensler is trying to make sure that banks cannot shield derivatives bets from effective oversight by funneling them overseas.