“The CFTC is at an important crossroads,” the Washington Post observes. “The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act directed the agency, with 674 employees and a $194 million budget, to oversee a $400 trillion piece of the unregulated derivatives market, a key contributor to the financial crisis. The CFTC has almost finished writing the rules mandated by the law and must now get Wall Street to comply.”
The House of Representatives recently voted to roll back a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that, as reporter Ailsa Chang explained on All Things Considered (NPR, 11/11/13), “prevents banks from using your deposits to trade in derivatives — risky securities that many believe contributed to
On Oct. 31, the Senate voted to filibuster the nomination of Representative Mel Watt as Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. This was an appalling vote on several levels. In the first place, the 46 Senators who said No to cloture were using
“’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.”