Wall Street’s Win on Swaps Rule Shows Washington Resurgence

[Purveyor]

Source: Bloomberg

By Cheyenne Hopkins and Silla Brush Dec 12, 2014 1:01 PM ET

Wall Street is re-emerging as a force in Washington as it closes in on one of its biggest wins against regulation since the financial crisis.

With must-pass spending legislation making its way through Congress this week, banks seized on an opportunity to attach a measure that would halt a planned restriction on derivatives trading they had long opposed. The industry’s lobbying extended to the highest levels of finance with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon pressing lawmakers to support the change.

Wall Street’s success, after four years of struggling to persuade Congress to ease the Dodd-Frank Act, is a precursor to more fights next year against some of the law’s hallmarks: the consumer protection bureau and stiff oversight of big financial companies whose failure could threaten the financial system.

“The Wall Street interests -- the big banks -- they’re back,” said Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-12/wall-street-s-win-on-swaps-rule-shows-resurgence-in-washington.html

[Veilex]

1. Why am I not surprised...

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told Democratic lawmakers at a caucus meeting last night that the administration was late to learn of the swaps provision’s inclusion and urged the Senate to remove it, according to a Democratic aide who requested anonymity to discuss the closed-door session

[dbackjon]

2. jAMIE dixon should be in jail

[sakabatou]

3. +1

[genwah]

4. Wall Street hasn't won yet! U.S. Senate: www.senate.gov

[99th_Monkey]

5. We wouldn't want to deny Wall St. of one of it's most useful tools

.. They really need derivatives to engineer The Crash of 2016

[amandabeech]

6. What this means is that bankers get to make AIG-style naked bets with deposits insured

by the Feds, i.e., your tax dollars. If the bets go south, we, the tax payers get to bail them out. We might get out money back in the long run, but there are no guarantees that that will happen.

No wonder Elizabeth Warren is so hopping mad.

According to the article:

The derivatives provision would let JPMorgan, Citigroup Inc. (C), Bank of America Corp. and other banks trade almost all swaps in divisions that have government backstops like deposit insurance. It would repeal a requirement that some of the trades be pushed out to separate units, which Wall Street argued would drive up costs for clients and increase risk in the financial system by moving the trades to firms less regulated than banks.

*snip*

The industry’s lobbying campaign on the provision gained momentum after a move by the Obama administration itself, which signaled last year that it was willing to bend on the swaps rule, said a person familiar with the bank’s campaign who sought anonymity to discuss the effort.

At the time, White House officials discussed a deal that would have scuttled the requirement in exchange for Republican support for a bill to increase funding for the International Monetary Fund. It ultimately fell through. Republicans and Wall Street, however, took notice: The rule wasn’t off limits to the administration.


And the Obama Administration was willing to allow the idiots on Wall Street to gamble with our money in exchange for propping up the IMF, which at least for the present, does not benefit us.

I am the beneficiary of Obamacare and my home state, Michigan, was helped greatly by the GM bailout, and I know that the pukes would have done neither of these things.

But we're bailing out the banks again, and allowing them to spend 10x more money directly bribing politicians, which is in the bill, too.

What is it about these d&%*(*^^^%d bankers that our President loves so much?

[blkmusclmachine]

7. Democrats acting dumb, again. Emphasis on the acting part.

We're complicit in all of it.