The fifth anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act prompted several articles today. Here here are few.
5 Numbers To Know As Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Celebrates Its 5th Birthday
From Think Progress:
Tuesday marks the five-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank overhaul of America’s money business. The law is officially old enough to start kindergarten, but its report card is spotty at best. Dodd-Frank put a new cop on the beat for consumers, and that agency’s independence and aggressiveness has produced more than $10 billion in direct benefits to Americans wronged by their financial services companies. But the law has been under siege throughout its life, with industry lobbyists outnumbering reform advocates by about 20-to-1 on Capitol Hill in 2012 alone and attending 14 times as many meetings with regulators in the law’s first three years. Five years after Dodd-Frank passed and seven since the recession-inducing crisis peaked, the banking industry doesn’t look all that different. Five years after Dodd-Frank, with the world’s largest economy still climbing out of the ditch the last Wall Street crisis caused, here are five numbers to celebrate the overhaul’s birthday.
Democrats’ new cause: Dodd-Frank
From Politico:
As the Dodd-Frank bill turns five on Tuesday, it suddenly has a host of new protectors: After years of acceding to industry demands for tweaks rolling back its financial rules, House Democrats have begun digging in against a number of proposed changes. Compared with last year, fewer Democrats this year are willing to vote on the floor for bills that would rewrite high-profile restrictions on banks and traders, according to a POLITICO analysis of the legislative record. And they’re also less likely to co-sponsor measures that banks want Congress to pass. Just last week, House Republicans were forced to pull three bipartisan bills after Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) threatened to rally Democrats against them. The shift in the House is making it less likely that any easing of Dodd-Frank’s rules will happen in the near future, even on issues with bipartisan support. That’s frustrating moderate Democrats, Republicans and bank lobbyists, who argue that tweaks are needed to deal with unintended consequences of the rules that could hamper financial markets.
OPINION: On Fifth Anniversary, Dodd-Frank Financial Regulations Appear to Be Here to Stay
From Roll Call:
Since it became law five years ago, Dodd-Frank has undergone only a handful of modest changes — mostly because of provisions that emerged as bargaining chips attached to unrelated must-pass bills to guarantee bipartisan support. That’s likely to remain the case for the 114th Congress, and perhaps beyond. A combination of lingering public anger toward Wall Street from the financial crisis, a grudging acceptance of new regulations from the financial industry and the increasing focus on implementing the law’s roughly 400 rules make it unlikely Dodd-Frank will undergo a rewrite until the next major financial crisis occurs. Instead, Republicans will continue their efforts to whittle away at chunks of the law, while Democrats line up heartily behind it.