The financial overhaul cleared the House on June 30 by a 237-192 margin, and the Senate approved it 60-39 – thanks to three key GOP votes – on July 15. Labor strongly campaigned for the overhaul, saying it is needed to halt the Wall Street excesses in trading shady pieces of paper, speculation and money manipulation that eventually brought the economy crashing down.
The legislation also solves “too big to fail” financial institution problems by giving the government a way to wind them down in receivership, rather than bailing them out or letting them crash. And it sets up a powerful Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to ride herd, in the name of consumers, on most shady practices.
The crash has cost millions of people their jobs and their mortgages, and ignited a firestorm of anger at the financial industry. But polls also show respondents think Congress spent too much time on fixing that problem and not enough on creating jobs.
A panel of experts convened by the New America Foundation,praised Congress for its job in fixing regulation of the financiers – but damned it for not fixing the financiers’ practices that drove the country into the ditch.
“The best way to consider this is not as a Wall Street overhaul, but that it changes the way we regulate Wall Street” and that it brings previously hidden financial transactions – by hedge funds and others and in such things as derivatives and credit default swaps – into the limelight of open exchanges and regulation, said Tim Fernholz, the financial coverage specialist for The American Prospect.
But the legislation also gives regulators “a lot of leeway,” he warned.
Heather McGhee, director of the Washington office of the Demos Foundation, countered that while the consumer agency is strong, the “too big to fail” provisions are not. More importantly, those who sought real financial system reform did not get it.
“A lot of people circling around” this bill “didn’t want to preserve the financial system. They wanted to change it,” she said.
Those changes would have restored the absolute wall – which a GOP-run Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton tore down in 1999 – between retail banking, which handles individual depositors, and investment banking, which lets the banks and other financial institutions speculate with depositors’ money.
“The result was there were much larger, riskier and overleveraged banks” and the legislation doesn’t really change that, she said.
What the legislation does, she conceded, is make it tougher for the financial institutions to take such risks – if the regulators cooperate. The regulators will have the power to set higher minimum capital standards for financial institutions. And regulators can swoop in beforehand if they think a failing institution could bring the entire financial system down and plunge us into another crash – just what happened in 2007-2008.
“The result is the legislation will create an internal cap, rather than an external cap, on size and riskiness” of the banks, McGhee said. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, tried unsuccessfully to insert a too-big-to-fail cap in the financial reform bill.
All of this will leave a lot of work to do for Americans for Financial Reform, the labor-backed coalition established to campaign for the comprehensive overhaul, said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, who is also a former state banking commissioner.
“AFR and the rest of the consumer community will be helpful in keeping the pressure on the regulators” to write tight rules governing the financial institutions, including the banks, securities dealers, traders, hedge funds and others, he said.
Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.
Share
The financial overhaul cleared the House on June 30 by a 237-192 margin, and the Senate approved it 60-39 – thanks to three key GOP votes – on July 15. Labor strongly campaigned for the overhaul, saying it is needed to halt the Wall Street excesses in trading shady pieces of paper, speculation and money manipulation that eventually brought the economy crashing down.
The legislation also solves “too big to fail” financial institution problems by giving the government a way to wind them down in receivership, rather than bailing them out or letting them crash. And it sets up a powerful Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to ride herd, in the name of consumers, on most shady practices.
The crash has cost millions of people their jobs and their mortgages, and ignited a firestorm of anger at the financial industry. But polls also show respondents think Congress spent too much time on fixing that problem and not enough on creating jobs.
A panel of experts convened by the New America Foundation,praised Congress for its job in fixing regulation of the financiers – but damned it for not fixing the financiers’ practices that drove the country into the ditch.
“The best way to consider this is not as a Wall Street overhaul, but that it changes the way we regulate Wall Street” and that it brings previously hidden financial transactions – by hedge funds and others and in such things as derivatives and credit default swaps – into the limelight of open exchanges and regulation, said Tim Fernholz, the financial coverage specialist for The American Prospect.
But the legislation also gives regulators “a lot of leeway,” he warned.
Heather McGhee, director of the Washington office of the Demos Foundation, countered that while the consumer agency is strong, the “too big to fail” provisions are not. More importantly, those who sought real financial system reform did not get it.
“A lot of people circling around” this bill “didn’t want to preserve the financial system. They wanted to change it,” she said.
Those changes would have restored the absolute wall – which a GOP-run Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton tore down in 1999 – between retail banking, which handles individual depositors, and investment banking, which lets the banks and other financial institutions speculate with depositors’ money.
“The result was there were much larger, riskier and overleveraged banks” and the legislation doesn’t really change that, she said.
What the legislation does, she conceded, is make it tougher for the financial institutions to take such risks – if the regulators cooperate. The regulators will have the power to set higher minimum capital standards for financial institutions. And regulators can swoop in beforehand if they think a failing institution could bring the entire financial system down and plunge us into another crash – just what happened in 2007-2008.
“The result is the legislation will create an internal cap, rather than an external cap, on size and riskiness” of the banks, McGhee said. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, tried unsuccessfully to insert a too-big-to-fail cap in the financial reform bill.
All of this will leave a lot of work to do for Americans for Financial Reform, the labor-backed coalition established to campaign for the comprehensive overhaul, said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, who is also a former state banking commissioner.
“AFR and the rest of the consumer community will be helpful in keeping the pressure on the regulators” to write tight rules governing the financial institutions, including the banks, securities dealers, traders, hedge funds and others, he said.
Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.