“[T]wo U.S. senators have proposed a bill that would make it easier for people to learn about and challenge [credit report] errors, as well as increase the credit reporting industry’s accountability for mistakes that go uncorrected…,” Fox Business news reports. “The bill drew praise from consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of American, the National Consumer Law Center, Americans for Financial Reform, and Consumers Union, the poliucy and advocacy arm of Consumer Reports.”
“We don’t believe that this is enough,” Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform told the Washington Post. “Raising $60 billion in extra capital is helpful, but it’s really not in line with the kinds of risk we saw in the financial crisis.”
“’There are provisions in this bill that would effectively unwind a good deal of the work the CFTC has already done and make it much harder for them to regulate the derivatives markets,’ Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition including the AFL-CIO labor federation, said in a phone interview.”
“The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law required the Fed to restrict its emergency lending powers so that too-big-to-fail banks don’t expect the central bank to dole out easy money again in the event of another financial crisis,” writes Erika Eichelberger of Mother Jones. Three years later, the Fed has come out with a draft rule that “misses the mark,” interpreting “the statute in ways that minimize limits on emergency lending authority.”
The National Review’s Reihan Salam examines the case for stronger regulation of nonbanks and “market-based financing,” and the political power of those, like the Blackstone Group’s Tony James, who are trying to convince the Obama administration to go slow. Salam expresses an “ideological bias” in favor of James’ position, while acknowledging the “serious and interesting” counter-arguments of AFR’s Marcus Stanley.
While the Administration wants to increase the CFTC’s budget, its $280 million request for FY 2015 is $35 million less than last year’s proposal, The American Banker points out. “We have the mandate, but not the money, to do the job,” Commissioner Bart Chilton said in a press release. Americans for Financial Reform, the story adds, has described underfunding of the CFTC as “a backdoor attack on derivatives regulation.”
