Free Republic

All the President's Man The Dodd Frank law was supposed to rein in abuses by Wall St. It was supposed to end "too big to fail." It was supposed to end so-called "risky trading" by banks. Some of us knew better. Barack Obama was effusive in his praise of the bill as he signed it. We are gathered in the heart of our nation’s capital, surrounded by memorials to leaders and citizens who served our nation in its earliest days and in its days of greatest trial. Today is such a time for America. Over the past two years, we...

Recently, Barack Obama has refrained from mentioning Dodd-Frank as one of his big accomplishments as President. That's fortunate, because had Obama used that as a campaign claim this month, the huge loss taken by JP Morgan and one-time Obama ally Jamie Dimon would have done serious damage. As it is, Politico wonders whether Obama might have a big problem convincing voters that he's done anything significant to address the underlying issues that created the 2008 financial-system collapse: The giant $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase highlights a central problem in President Barack ObamaÂ’s case for a second term: Four...

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history." This...

Financial businesses — from banks to investment advisers — will spend 24 million hours a year to comply with the first 185 regulations to implement the Dodd Frank Act, according to the House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is warning that if GOP lawmakers continue their push to roll back portions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, it could "critically undermine" the ability to prevent damaging future crises. In a letter sent to lawmakers Tuesday, Geithner blasted a package of measures set to be considered by the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, including a pair that would repeal or trim key pieces of the Wall Street makeover. "The act provides essential reforms that should not be weakened or repealed," he wrote to committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and ranking member Rep. Barney Frank...

The Financial Times today carries a story that U.S. banks have been resisting a new Fed regulation—issued under the Dodd-Frank Act—that would limit their credit exposure to one another. According to the article, the banks have data showing that this would reduce credit availability by about $1.2 trillion. Similar restrictions will apply to all nonbank financial firms—insurers, finance companies, securities firms, hedge funds, and others—that could be designated as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a group of federal financial regulators created under the Dodd-Frank Act. If that occurs, these firms will become subject...

You mention toxic mortgages. How does Dodd-Frank address that problem?Not at all. There is no attempt in Dodd-Frank to address the key problem of government subsidization of mortgage risk, and the exposures of Fannie Mae [FNMA], Freddie Mac [FMCC], and the Federal Housing Administration are still growing. How do you explain the omission?There is a powerful political interest that wants real-estate lending to be sponsored by the government. Starting about 1830, an important influence on the politics of banking came from farming interests, which increasingly promoted bank exposure to farm real-estate risk. What has changed since World War II is...

During the Vietnam conflict, a common complaint of soldiers was that you could never tell who the enemy really was. In this current economic recession, too, I am beginning to wonder who the enemy of our recovery really is. The president, Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the regulators are all telling us why so many others are to blame. The big banks have done it to us! shouts one group. Wall Street did it, claims another. Homebuyers who bought homes they could not afford are the real culprit! claims another. Perhaps those who have been charged with the responsibility for...

This is truly Orwellian: the latest and greatest Executive Branch/Federal Reserve power grab is labeled "consumer protection." I am indebted to correspondent Jim S. who seems to be one of the few Americans to have actually sorted through this monstrosity and gleaned its true nature: an unprecedented extension of Executive (i.e. Imperial Presidency) and Federal Reserve power.

Did President Barack Obama’s appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without a Senate confirmation vote violate the Constitution? The answer is plainly yes.Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Officers of the United States … but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone (and) … The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess...

Regulation: Tuesday's GOP debate moderator was shocked by the front-runners' broadside against Dodd-Frank banking rules. He seemed to think they were hyping their damage. They weren't. The media elite are under the assumption that all government regulations are good. So when both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich took shots at Dodd-Frank, NBC News anchor Brian Williams was flabbergasted. He expressed skepticism that its new rules posed any problem. Gingrich straightened him out, arguing the media and the public don't know how "bad" the Democrats' law is. "If you could repeal Dodd-Frank tomorrow morning, you would see the economy start to...

<p>I'm officialy endorsing Newt Gingrich for president today. Was going to wait until after Florida, but see no reason to delay. We need Newt to win in South Carolina and Florida to stop any possible momentum building up for the establishment big government, statist, abortionist RINO!!</p>

If Lizzy [Elizabeth] Warden is truly opposed to Wall Street money, then shouldn’t she reject the DSCC’s money? Otherwise she is just using the DSCC to funnel in Wall Street money.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man whose political success is largely attributable to the aura of befuddled incompetence he uses to disarm his adversaries, was a failed Watergate baby. In 1974, a slew of often sanctimonious and very liberal Democratic politicians rode the tide of understandable national disgust with Richard Nixon to Congress. Then the lieutenant governor of Nevada, Reid ran for the U.S. Senate, hoping to tie his opponent to the "imperial presidency" that had allegedly sprung up ex nihilo under Nixon. Given Nevada's inherent conservatism (at least back then), Reid cast himself as an incorruptible champion of...

President Barack Obama says he won't take "no" as an answer from Republicans, so he's going around them to appoint the head of a new consumer protection agency. Obama says Republicans would just keep holding Richard Cordray's nomination hostage—and the president says that's inexcusable and wrong. He says Cordray must be in place in order for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to start helping consumers deal with unscrupulous mortgage companies, dishonest payday lenders, and others. Obama announced the appointment of Cordray during a stop Wednesday in Ohio, where Cordray once served as attorney general. Republicans are outraged but Obama says...

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris is suing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the mortgage giants to answer questions about their role in California's housing meltdown. In two suits filed Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court, Harris seeks to compel the companies to respond to subpoenas from her office that have been ignored so far. Harris is seeking information about the practices by Fannie and Freddie in California as part of her ongoing investigation into the mortgage industry. The suits ask a judge to order the two companies to answer a set of 51 questions served in...

"Barney Frank: I've destroyed the economy, my work here is done." — Washington Times headline, Nov. 29 It was quite a confluence of news last week when in the span of hours came Rep. Frank's retirement announcement, a report on declining housing prices and home-ownership rates, and a poll belaboring the obvious about Americans' fears about the housing and stock markets. With his fellow Democrat, former Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., shoulders much of the blame for today's economic catastrophe and the fiscal crises plaguing governments at all levels. They spent years pushing policies that ultimately required...

Wrapping himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt's "National Greatness" agenda, President Obama urged the nation to stand strong and unite behind ... his umpteenth regulatory czar. Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat. If Richard Cordray, the stalled White House nominee to enforce the Dodd-Frank financial bureaucracy, is not approved, the wheedler-in-chief warned in Osawatomie, Kan.: "Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student or a senior citizen or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can't afford -- something that...

Job-killing bank regulations threaten to wipe out all the gains in private-sector employment since the recovery began, the industry warns. Washington, however, is hiring thousands more bureaucrats to enforce the rules. Signed into law last year, the Dodd-Frank Act is the biggest rewrite of financial regulations since the New Deal. It was intended to rein in Wall Street "excesses." But the banking industry says burdensome red tape is hurting economic growth and jobs in a still-sluggish labor market. "The level of real GDP could be 2.7% less by the year 2015 than would otherwise be the case for the United...

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees. Need to replace a lost debit card? Bank of America now charges $5 — or $20 for rush delivery. Deposit money with a mobile phone? At U.S. Bancorp, it is now 50 cents a check. Want cash wired to your account? Starting in December, that will cost $15 for each incoming domestic payment at TD Bank. Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to...

We Didn’t DeregulateFrom the April 5, 2010, issue of NR. When Barack Obama was running for president, he made no secret of his plan to “restore commonsense regulation� by closing up regulatory “loopholes� he blamed Republicans for opening. Deregulation of the financial industry, he argued, was a main cause of the financial crisis.Much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, President Obama offered a sweeping, ambitious regulatory agenda: a total revamp of the financial industry, including reform of the process by which loans are converted into securities; more robust federal regulation of credit-rating agencies; the creation of a systemic-risk...

fter a worldwide financial meltdown — and a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout — the need for common-sense financial reforms was clear. But now, even though the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (known as Dodd-Frank, after Rep. Barney Frank and me, its sponsors) is only beginning to take effect, critics are launching false attacks against the law in an effort to undermine it. Whether they are intentionally misleading or just misguided, they are wrong about the law’s purpose and impact. 1. Dodd-Frank is deepening the economic slowdown. Critics who charge that the law is aggravating the recession...

Regulators on Friday closed two banks in Georgia and one each in Florida and Colorado, raising to 84 the number of U.S. banks that have failed this year. The number of closures has fallen sharply this year as banks have worked their way through bad debt. By this time last year, regulators had shuttered 139 banks. FDIC seized the four banks. The largest by far was Community Banks of Colorado, based in Greenwood ... Also shuttered were Community Capital Bank, Jonesboro, Ga. ... Decatur First Bank ... and Old Harbor Bank, Clearwater, Fla. Georgia and Florida have been among the...

Ronald Arculli, Chairman of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, has his eye on the U. S. Congress, and he’s not the only one. International stock exchange leaders voiced their wariness at a panel on exchange regulation yesterday at the World Federation of Exchanges’ general assembly and annual meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Our friends in America have this awful habit of extending their laws beyond their shores, and Dodd-Frank is no exception,” said Arculli, who is Chairman of the WFE. “My caution to those of us from Asia is really to keep a very close watch on the developments.” Dodd-Frank...

In Tuesday night’s Dartmouth debate, the Republican candidates were generally agreed on the need to repeal Dodd-Frank. That is all well and good, but banking does need regulation. For 70 years a cluster of New Deal laws, the Glass-Steagall laws, successfully prevented American banks from becoming “too big to fail.” Dodd-Frank should be repealed, and an updated Glass-Steagall should replace it.

There are the bills a president signs sitting in the Oval Office and the bills that merit a Rose Garden ceremony. And then there are bills so momentous—or at least so critical to a president’s reelection prospects—that those around the commander in chief orchestrate a more elaborate ceremony. Such was the case with (The biggest lie of all)the financial-reform package that President Obama signed into law last July against a backdrop of velvet curtains in a resplendent venue a few blocks from the White House. “Passing this bill was no easy task,” Obama told the 400 dignitaries who witnessed the...

Dick Durbin's Amendment stipulates new rules that will lead to lower fees for merchants when you swipe a debit card in their stores. Merchants currently pay around 1% of every debit card transaction to the credit card cartel. The lower fees to merchants, in theory, could lower prices in stores. We don't think consumers will benefit. The Australian government capped credit and debit interchange in 2003, which has resulted in some pretty pathetic credit card offers compared to what we have stateside. The average annual fee in Australia is $132, compared with $19 in the US. Rewards programs are also...

Hold on to your wallet: The Durbin Amendment goes into effect Saturday. The once-obscure amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill limits “interchange fees,” which banks charge to merchants for providing the service that allows stores to accept debit-card payments. The fees were cut by some 80 percent, which makes it less profitable for banks to offer debit-card services. So the banks have done the natural thing and begun to transfer the fee from merchants to their customers, with Bank of America announcing a new $5-per-month fee for debit-card users. Naturally, the amendment’s author, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) is in...

(The news that BofA customers will soon shoulder a monthly charge for debit purchases sparks outrage — and threats to abandon the bank altogether.) Bank of America, proclaiming that its bottom line is hurt by new legislation that limits how much money banks can charge retailers for the privilege of letting customers pay with debit cards, announced that it will make up for those losses by charging customers a $5 monthly fee. The fee takes effect in 2012 and affects any customer who makes debit purchases. ATM and credit card transactions will remain free. Predictably, the bank's customers are not...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You remember, ladies and gentlemen, I can't tell you the number of times it has become a major discussion topic for callers when banks have raised the ATM fee. People go nuts. They e-mailed me and called and talked about what a bunch of rotten creeps the banks were, "Why does there have to be a fee on the ATM anyway? I'm already paying this bank out the wazoo." Well, sit tight because your bank is going to jack up your debit card fee. "Bank of America customers with basic checking accounts will be hit with a...

As I detailed here in February in "Dick Durbin Is Stealing Your Free Checking," thanks to price controls on debit card transactions from the Durbin Amendment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank "financial reform" law, free checking is going the way of the dodo bird. The Durbin price controls on interchange fees -- the so-called "swipe fees" that retailers pay to bank and credit unions that process debit card transactions, go into effect this Saturday, October 1, and are already showing more dire effects than originally predicted. Not only is free checking disappearing at a rapid pace -- a new Bankrate.com survey...

On Sat., Oct. 1, new regulations from the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul go into effect on debit cards. Specifically, they impose price controls on “interchange fees,” the fees that banks and credit unions charge to retailers on debit card transactions. The average interchange fee is about 44 cents. The new rules limit the fees to 21 to 24 cents. “The costs of processing debit card transactions doesn’t go away because you limit the price,” said John Berlau, director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. “That shifts the costs to consumers.”

“Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations. Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.” “It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months. “The law is passed, but...

The Dodd-Frank Act goes on for 2,319 pages. Like Nancy Pelosi's "pass it to find out what's in the O'care Bill" statement, Senator Dodd said, "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we've done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done." The Wall Street Journal reported on July 14, 2010, just one week before Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law that it will "unleash the biggest wave of new federal financial rule-making...

Of the many financial reforms in Dodd-Frank, a requirement that lenders retain a share of the risk in mortgages they sell to investors seemed like a no-brainer. If lenders were on the hook, too, the thinking went, they would tighten standards and avoid the kind of defaults that contributed to the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis. But now that a rule to implement this provision has been written, critics say the requirement will make it so hard to get a mortgage that it will further depress the housing market and undercut a struggling economy. “I’ve been...

The WSJ rightly links the announcement to over-regulation generally, and Dodd-Frank specifically, which somehow managed to impose comprehensive control upon the entire financial system without addressing the actual easy money and housing policy causes of the fianancial crisis. Naturally, every political boondoggle has its consequences-- 30,000 jobs at BofA in the extant case--which Olympian legislators failed to consider while smiting the impious, legislating morality, covering their derrières and, generally, saving the planet.

The amount billed by Debevoise & Plimpton to write a 17-page letter on a new rule intended to rein in risky banking — around $100,000 — would make most authors jealous. That’s the fee just for parsing the proper definition of a bank-owned hedge fund. Longer and more complex regulatory missives, weighing in on who should be deemed too big to fail or how derivatives are traded, can easily cost twice as much. These comment letters could save Wall Street banks billions of dollars if they help persuade policy makers to adopt a more lenient interpretation of the coming rules....

Bet you thought Dodd-Frank was just designed to go after those greedy banks on Wall Street didn’t you? Well, there are always unintended consequences of regulation. Dodd-Frank is one of the worst bills ever passed by a Congress in the history of the United States. Not only is it proving to restrict access to money by poor people, it is imposing crushing costs on smaller banks-effectively putting them out of business. This makes access to capital even tougher, because instead of going to a small bank where you can develop a relationship, a businessman now needs to go to a...

NEWS last week that the Federal Reserve would keep interest rates near zero until mid-2013 was welcomed by many investors, but the bleak message about the economy still came through loud and clear. The Fed has spent several years trying to kick-start the economy with low rates and other policies, with little success. Which raises this question: Will more of the same help now? Among the doubters is Thomas M. Hoenig, the soon-to-be former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Mr. Hoenig, at the helm of the Kansas City Fed for the last 20 years, has thought...

A U.S. Court of Appeals ruled July 22 that the Securities and Exchange Commission did not properly conduct a cost-benefit analysis before finalizing a proxy rule required by the Dodd-Frank Act, National Mortgage News reported Aug. 3. The ruling’s effect is expected to be widespread. The case was originally brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, which claimed the SEC did not consider the full cost associated with requiring a corporation to include in its proxy materials director nominees put forward by a shareholder who has owned 3 percent or more of company stock for at least...

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday requested public comment on a proposed rule under Regulation Z that would require creditors to determine a consumer's ability to repay a mortgage before making the loan and would establish minimum mortgage underwriting standards. The revisions to the regulation, which implements the Truth in Lending Act (TILA), are being made pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The proposal would apply to ALL CONSUMER MORTGAGES(except home equity lines of credit, timeshare plans, reverse mortgages, or temporary loans).

Dodd-Frank, the 2,300-page financial “reform” monstrosity spearheaded by Capitol Hill corruptocrats, turned 1 this week. It made too-big banks bigger. It made too-risky incentives riskier. It made a lousy economy lousier. Billed as a “consumer protection” act, Dodd-Frank has succeeded phenomenally — in protecting and stimulating the business-stifling business of government. Dodd-Frank is a tyrannical triumph of rule-makers, lobbyists and other non-elected spongers over taxpayers. If you don’t want an unseemly glimpse into the self-serving, sausage-making process that feeds the insatiable Beltway industry, read no further. The law’s implementation process is so far-reaching and Byzantine that every member of Congress...

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, another costly regulatory package that has stunted economic growth. As we noted at its passage, Dodd-Frank does nothing to mitigate a future potential crisis while imposing over 400 job-killing regulations cloaked in empty rhetoric about consumer protection. With new business creation at a 17-year low, its time for the House of Representatives to revisit some of the key provisions of Dodd-Frank, an overhaul we reviewed in our 2010 Cost of Government Day Report. This afternoon, House members will have the chance to do just...

As the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau officially opened its doors Thursday, the House was considering legislation that could restrict its authority to act against abuses of the financial system. Republican sponsors of the bill say they are simply trying to promote transparency and accountability in the agency that was created a year ago as part of President Barack Obama's overhaul of the rules governing financial markets. But the White House has threatened to veto the legislation, saying it would expose consumers to the same risks that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. The Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to take...

On the surface, it looks like the Dodd-Frank financial oversight law is in trouble. U.S. regulators are months behind schedule in rulemaking, Republicans have succeeded in holding agency funding hostage, and odds are good that the business community will win its first court challenge to an important provision. On top of that, Republicans and Wall Street titans are selling a doomsday scenario of Dodd-Frank killing the struggling economic recovery. Behind the scenes, though, a sort of acceptance is setting in. "There are people who are... using budget conversations and other delay-type of activities to water down or substantively change Dodd-Frank....

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD. [snip] Another Reno protege, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference is, he said, bankers discriminate "with a smile" and "fine print." He said this kind of racism, though more subtle, is "every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood." Perez has put...

In just a few days some fairly big changes in the commodities and currency trading markets are expected to land with a thud.  The changes stem from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act aimed primarily at consumer lending, but is also having a wide ranging impact on securities trading.  Some of the changes are fairly straightforward and are intended to curb speculation that comes at the expense of consumers.  Others are aimed at curbing the excesses of the largely unregulated derivatives market.  Most of those changes will generally be good for consumers, all were well-intended but, like...

New York soon will no longer be the financial capital of the world thanks to a hostile government that has served up a menu of punitive regulations aimed at driving big banks out of the country, says analyst Dick Bove. In his latest broadside against the post-crisis regulatory environment, Bove asserts that a recent spate of layoffs, particularly by Goldman Sachs, is just the latest sign that large financial institutions will have to take their operations overseas. The result, he says, will not be good both for New York and the nation. ... In the current climate, Bove says the...

If either the GOP contenders or President Obama plan on dismissing Michele Bachmann’s candidacy out of hand because she represents the Tea Party, they ought to think twice.In the war of economics and business, where these campaigns will likely be won or lost, Bachmann has shown the strongest practical grasp on issues of the American economy vs. any of the candidates in the race. Certainly she has the academic and business experience for her views on the economy to be taken seriously. "After high school, meanwhile, the disciplined Bachmann spent time on a Kibbutz in Israel, graduated from Winona State University...

The Dodd Frank Act does not boast many friends in the financial industry. It does not take much asking around to find a banker who believes that its architects – senators Chris Dodd and Barney Frank – have contributed to many firms’ marked difficulties in reaching return on equity targets. three critical problems with the legislation: artificial deadlines, the rule-making process, and, above all, the ongoing budget stalemate in the US. Although the act contains over 2,000 pages, it is, in many ways, more remarkable for what did not make it into the text. Rather than lay down prescriptions for...