“Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform… said Mr Sarao’s arrest highlighted the weakness of regulation and fragmented markets. ‘If your kid is playing around in your house and the floor collapses, is the problem that the kid was jumping up and down or that your house was built badly? You should have a structure that should withstand this kind of thing,’ he said.”
“Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, said Warren’s speech lays ‘down the gauntlet for people in terms of taking specific, strong steps — including steps that go beyond Dodd-Frank — to reform Wall Street. That’s very meaningful in terms of the challenge it puts to people to say whether they’re in favor of that or not,’ he said.”
“‘I see this as a win not just for too-big-to-fail, but for the extension of the regulatory perimeter in Dodd-Frank,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “You basically had one of the largest consumer and investment banks in the country stapled onto a major industrial corporation, and because it was part of this conglomerate, it wasn’t being regulated like a major bank. When the Fed changed that regime, GE decided it wouldn’t be as profitable.'”
AFR organized a briefing for Senate Banking staff on the regulation of large regional banks and the potential risks to the financial system that could emerge if regulatory authority over these banks is significantly diminished. AFR Policy Director Marcus Stanley and Professor Heidi Schooner of the Catholic University School of Law presented at the briefing.
“Our experience has been that industry dramatically misrepresents the content and the impact of the rule, by making unsubstantiated claims” before it is released, said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of groups that advocates for stronger regulation of Wall Street. “You are going to get a lot of fear-mongering.”
“Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, which backs tougher regulation of Wall Street, said banks and their Republican allies were seeking to chip away at Dodd-Frank with a series of piecemeal delays and limits on regulatory authority. ‘The strategy is to take many of these bills and amendments and combine them together into packaged legislation. In combination, these so-called technical fixes will very significantly undermine Dodd-Frank and make it impossible to effectively police the financial sector,’ he said.”
“The financial industry has been methodical, drafting technically complicated legislation that can pass the heavily Republican House with a few Democratic votes. And then, once approved, Wall Street has pushed to tack such measures on to larger bills considered too important for the White House to block. ‘This all works together: Put it up for stand-alone vote, get some Democrats on it, and then when you push it onto a must-pass bill, say it’s a bipartisan bill that’s already passed,’ said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform.
“PNC, the nation’s 10th largest bank, hasn’t spent the past few years just building itself into a financial behemoth. Like many other banks, it’s built up political capital too. And last year, it spent some of that currency to help roll back a regulation [that] barred banks with federally insured deposits from engaging in certain potentially high-risk financial transactions… Swaps have legitimate uses, but ‘when things go wrong in this area, they go very very wrong,’ said Marcus Stanley [of] Americans for Financial Reform.”
“We’re going to see repeated attempts to go in with seemingly technical changes that intimidate regulators and keep them from putting teeth in regulations,” predicted Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform… “If we return to the precrisis business as usual, where it’s routine for people to accommodate Wall Street on these technical changes, they’re just going to unravel the postcrisis regulation piece by piece.”
Supporters of a rule that would require public companies to disclose the ratio between executive and median employee pay say the Securities and Exchange Commission should move soon to enact the regulation. “It’s one of the simplest, most straightforward Dodd-Frank rules,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform.