“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.
“Regulators have to get serious about implementing this law,” AFR policy director Marcus Stanley told the Washington Post. “The derivatives market is dominated by insured banks,” which means taxpayers would be on the hook if they ran into trouble, he said.
“We expected that it would be hard to keep what we’d won and do more going forward,” AFR’s Lisa Donner tells USA Today. “It’s been slower and harder than we’d hoped.”
Citi’s recommendations influenced “more than 70 lines” of an 85-line bill. Two key paragraphs “were copied nearly word for word” from a draft prepared by Citi and two other large banks.
“U.S. bankers and insurers are trying to use trade deals, which can trump existing legislation, to weaken parts of the Dodd-Frank Act…,” according to Carter Dougherty of Bloomberg.
Banks could “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 told the Washington Post.