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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank
http://www.thenation.com/article/174113/how-wall-street-defanged-dodd-frankThe mood was triumphant on the morning of July 21, 2010, when Barack Obama, not quite two years into his presidency, strode to a podium inside the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House. As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Actthe sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapseinto law, the president first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all. Passing this was no easy task, he told the crowd of hundreds. We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.
Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed billnearly six lobbyists for every member of Congress. For Michael Barr, then an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, the trench warfare spurred by Dodd-Frank left him shellshocked. You pick a page at random, says Barr, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, and Ill tell you about all the issues on that page where the fighting was intense. Remarkably, despite the onslaught, Dodd-Frank got stronger rather than weaker the closer we got to passage, which is incredibly unusual, says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, one of a handful of advocacy groups that fought tenaciously for the bill.
That sense of victory barely lasted barely the morning. The same financial behemoths that had fought so ferociously to block Dodd-Frank were not going to let the mere fact of the bills passage ruin their plans. Halftime, shrugged Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group representing 100 of the countrys largest financial institutions. It was 5:30 am on a Friday when a joint House-Senate conference committee approved the bills final language. By Sunday, an industry lawyer named Annette Nazaretha former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission whose firm counts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs among its clientshad already sent off a heavily annotated copy of the 848-page bill to colleagues at her old agency. According to a congressional staffer whose boss was a key architect of Dodd-Frank, Nazareth is one of two generals running the campaign to undo the bill. The other is Eugene Scalia, a fearsome litigator and son of the Supreme Court justice.
After Dodd-Franks passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. Thats when the real work began, Talbott tells me. One working group focused on derivatives reform, including the requirement that these complex financial instruments now be sold on open exchanges in the fashion of stocks and bonds. Another focused on efforts to hammer out the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit the ability of federally insured banks to wager on risky ventures. A third tackled the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created to protect ordinary consumers from Wall Street deceptions involving mortgages, credit cards and other major profit centers for the banks.
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How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank (Original Post)
xchrom
May 2013
OP
msongs
(67,381 posts)1. obama and congress are supposed to be OUR lobbyists. lol fat chance on that nt
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)2. Yes - Pretty Disappointing Performance To Date
eom
orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)3. The enemies Jefferson warned us about . n/t