Tag Archives: dodd-frank

Trump Plans to Gut Dodd-Frank Because His Friends "Just Can’t Borrow Money"

by MichellYCXX Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Trump plans to sign an executive order rolling back regulations that his friends find annoying:

The move would address another one of Trump’s campaign promises: Dismantling 2010’s financial reform legislation, known as Dodd Frank. The legislation forced banks to take various steps to prevent another financial crisis, including holding more capital and taking yearly “stress tests” to prove they could withstand economic turbulence. The financial industry, particularly its small community banks, complained the rules went too far.

“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank,” Trump said during a meeting with business leaders Friday morning. “Because frankly, I have so many people, friends of mine, that had nice businesses, they just can’t borrow money … because the banks just won’t let them borrow because of the rules and regulations in Dodd Frank.”

Hey, who needs rules to make banks safer and prevent another financial crash? That’s for weenies. Trump’s rich friends are suffering, and that’s all that matters.

But just in case anyone cares, Trump’s friends aren’t suffering. Last year, total commercial lending hit $2 trillion, compared to $1.5 trillion at the height of the housing bubble. And ever since Dodd-Frank passed, commercial lending has been increasing quite smartly, at about 10 percent per year. That’s higher growth than in the two decades before Obama was elected.

But those are just boring old facts. What matters is Trump’s fiction about his poor friends who can’t get loans. Carry on.

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Trump Plans to Gut Dodd-Frank Because His Friends "Just Can’t Borrow Money"

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Chart of the Day: Another Sign That Dodd-Frank Is Working

by AdelaidaH Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Via Matt O’Brien, this chart from JP Morgan shows financial sector leverage over the past few decades. As you can see, leverage skyrocketed during the Bush era, which contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown, and then plummeted shortly thereafter. Then it flattened out for a couple of years, and under normal circumstances it probably would have started to climb again when the economy began to recover. Two things stopped it: Dodd-Frank and Basel III, both of which mandated higher capital requirements and thus lower overall leverage levels. This has reduced Wall Street profits but made the banking system safer for everyone.

In other words: financial regulation FTW. Nothing is perfect, and Wall Street is doing everything it can to undermine Dodd-Frank during the rulemaking process, but if it accomplishes nothing except encouraging less leverage it will have done its most important job.

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Chart of the Day: Another Sign That Dodd-Frank Is Working

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Elizabeth Warren Launches New Battle Against the Fed

by ManuelMaurer Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

While speaking before the Senate’s Banking Committee on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hit Fed Chair Janet Yellen with a string of harsh questions over the performance of Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, who is at the helm of an investigation of a Fed leak from September 2012.

Warren has expressed frustrations over the investigation’s lack of public information.

“Wall Street banks could profit handsomely if they knew about the Fed’s plans before the rest of the market found out, and that’s why any leak of confidential information from the Fed results in serious penalties for the people who are responsible,” Warren said on Tuesday. “But apparently there have been no consequences for the most recent leak.”

The Massachusetts senator specifically pointed to Alvarez’s Wall Street-friendly reputation, mainly referring to his past criticisms of Dodd-Frank, when she asked Yellen whether the Fed’s views aligned with those of its top lawyer.

Pressed for a strict yes or no response, Yellen eventually said she is “not seeking to alter Dodd-Frank in any way at this time.”

“Do you think that it is appropriate that Mr. Alvarez took public positions that do not evidently reflect the public position of the Fed’s board, especially before an audience that has a direct financial interest in how the Fed enforces its rules?” Warren responded.

Yellen appeared slightly irritated:

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Elizabeth Warren Launches New Battle Against the Fed

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Elizabeth Warren: Wall Street Just Got Another Giveaway

by AdriennLeCouteu Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Congress did Wall Street a solid. When lawmakers passed a giant spending bill that funds the government through September, they included a provision written by Citigroup lobbyists that allows banks to make more risky trades with taxpayer-insured money. Then, on Thursday, bankers got another giveaway: The Federal Reserve announced it would delay for up to two years implementation of a crucial section of the Volcker rule—one of the most important regulations to come out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The rule generally forbids the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. The move by the Fed pushes the deadline for banks to comply past the next presidential election and gives Wall Street lobbyists more time to weaken it.

“Less than a week after Wall Street slipped a bailout provision written by Citigroup into the government spending bill, the Fed has given the big banks another victory,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement Friday.

“It’s really hard to see an excuse for this,” says Marcus Stanley, the financial policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group.

The Volcker rule ensures that financial institutions don’t engage in something called proprietary trading, which is when a bank trades for its own benefit as opposed to for the benefit of its customers. Banks were supposed to comply with the Volcker rule by July 21, 2014. Last year, when banking watchdogs finalized the rule, the Fed granted banks a year-long extension. The Fed’s Thursday announcement gives banks another year to get rid of certain investments—including those in private equity firms and hedge funds. The central bank also noted Thursday that it plans to push out the deadline again next year, by another 12 months. That brings the new compliance deadline to July 2017, far past the 2016 election. If the new president is a Republican, he could fill his administration with Wall Street insiders opposed to the rule, making it even easier for lobbyists to gut it.

Before the Volcker rule was finalized last year, the financial industry fought like mad to weaken it. The regulation could slash the total annual profits of the eight largest US banks by up to $10 billion, according to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s. Banking reform advocates were fairly happy with way the final reg turned out. But now the financial industry has extra time to take a few more whacks at rule before banks actually have to obey it. “Wall Street’s loophole lawyers and other hired guns will… continue to hit at the rule as if it were a piñata,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said when regulators completed the rule in 2013.

The Dodd-Frank law already contains a provision allowing banks that will have difficulty getting rid of particular investments before the initial compliance deadline to request an extension from banking regulators. The Fed’s announcement yesterday amounts to an unnecessary “blanket” extension, Stanley says. “It’s hogwash.”

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Elizabeth Warren: Wall Street Just Got Another Giveaway

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Regulators for Keeping Banks “Too Big to Fail”

by KirkM79lwwbk Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

Five years after the financial crash, most congressional Democrats seem content to live with the status quo. They tackled financial reform in 2010 when they passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and they’d prefer to leave the nitty-gritty details of keeping banks in check to federal agencies rather than pass new legislation.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won’t be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and senate aides, that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. “Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?” she said. “I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That’s what oversight means. And that’s certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis.”

She noted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency she conceived of and helped guide to formation, has met its deadlines for writing rules. But the other federal agencies have been an utter failure at keeping to the schedule laid out by Dodd-Frank. A recent report by Davis Polk found that 60 percent of deadlines had been missed. Thirty percent of Dodd-Frank-mandated rules haven’t even been proposed yet, let alone finalized.

Warren spoke at an event assessing the state of financial reform hosted by Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and the Roosevelt Institute. The two organizations released a 125-page report Tuesday outlining where Dodd-Frank has succeeded and failed, with a heavy emphasis on where the act failed to tame the biggest banks’ risky activities and how they still expose the entire economy to risk should they collapse.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Regulators for Keeping Banks “Too Big to Fail”

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