“”The industry’s agenda is far-reaching,” [AFR’s Jim] Lardner wrote in U.S. News & World Report. ‘But the riders all share a common purpose: They would make it easier for banks and financial companies to exploit us, whether by cheating consumers, engaging in reckless bets or using taxpayer subsidies to generate windfall profits for a handful of giant institutions and a narrow financial elite.'”
“Lisa Donner, head of Americans for Financial Reform… dismissed the notion that Congress needs to re-debate the agency’s structure. ‘Each month that goes by, it’s easier to make the case that CFPB is doing its job,’ Donner said. ‘These questions have been asked and answered.’”
It’s “a form of agency leadership that has been shown again and again to produce weak regulation and enforcement at best, and partisan gridlock at worst,” said Jim Lardner of AFR. “The commission idea is being promoted by an alliance of financial industry lobbyists and lawmakers who have been out to undermine the Bureau’s effectiveness ever since they failed to block its creation.”
AFR’s Marcus Stanley: “Why are we thinking that the [financial] industry and the industry lobby knows better than the regulators? To say that Dodd-Frank is some straitjacket ignores the [truth] that regulators have lots of chances to adjust [its implementation].”
“Consumer groups are deeply skeptical of the debate, arguing it is just a talking point for the regional and big banks to weaken Dodd-Frank. ‘It’s basically an attempt to put up a sort of fog of complicated technical terms around industry’s desire to reverse pretty basic financial reforms,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director for public advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. There’s no academic consensus on any single best way to measure [liquidity] … so you can raise it as this boogeyman in a way that is not really particularly connected to the substantive issues.'”
“Bonds seem to trade in smaller transaction sizes than they once did… That is perceived as a sign of illiquidity… A better indication, according to a presentation by Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, would be total trading in the corporate market, which in fact has slightly increased since the financial crisis.”