“The strength of the rule is the scope of the compliance regime,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform. “The regulators correctly realized that most proprietary trading is hidden within supposedly innocent activities like hedging or market making.”
“We’ve seen that court challenges are a major element of the [financial] industry’s plan to block strong regulations,” says Marcus Stanley, the policy director of the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform. “So having a better ideological balance on the court should be very helpful to financial reform.”
Vacancies now “should be easier to fill with people who meet the basic criteria of having a commitment to fulfilling the law,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform… The change in the Senate’s rules come at a time when judges are expected to decide major disputes over provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, ObamaCare and the president’s push on climate change, several observers of the court said.”
“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 the 2008 financial crisis.” “The purpose of this part of
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 a procedural ploy to duck their responsibility to consider and