“We should not accept a financial system that allows the biggest banks to emerge from a crisis in record-setting shape while working Americans continue to struggle.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the launch event for a new AFR/Roosevelt Institute report on the state of financial reform.
AFR wrote to the banking regulators to urge them to strengthen the new supplementary leverage ratio proposed for large U.S. banks.
“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.”
A Policy Forum on the Small-Business Stake in Big-Bank Reform Five years after the 2008 crisis, the financial world remains dominated by a half dozen megabanks which continue to engage in speculative activities for their own enrichment, even as they enjoy the benefits of
“This legislation restores the division between commercial banking and financial market activities – a change that will make our financial system more secure and better able to support the real economy.”
AFR sent a letter to regulators emphasizing the lessons from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) report on the London Whale.
The Dodd-Frank Act, Mike Konczal points out on washingtonpost.com (5/6/13), left it to regulators to decide how much capital banks must set aside. And U.S. regulators have ceded much of the task to the international panel of bank overseers working on the standards known as
“[I]t has taken federal regulators nearly three years since the passage of Dodd-Frank… to define which nonbank companies, if they were to fail, could threaten the integrity of the country’s financial system.”
With too many in Washington once again echoing the “What’s good for us is good for America” mantra of Wall Street, the Senate’s new findings should shred any argument for retreat from key reforms.
AFR’s Marcus Stanley was interviewed by Peter Barnes of Fox Business News on March 11.