Some of you may know that the Dodd-Frank legislation, enacted in 2010, turned five years old just yesterday. The legislation didn’t throw a tantrum, but the financial industry has been throwing one for most of the last five years.
To say that Dodd-Frank is complicated would be a colossal understatement. The bill has sixteen separate tiles as follows:
Title I – Financial Stability
Title II – Orderly Liquidation Authority
Title III – Transfer of Powers to the Comptroller, the FDIC, and the Fed
Title IV – Regulation of Advisers to Hedge Funds and Others
Title V – Insurance
Title VI – Improvements to Regulation
Title VII – Wall Street Transparency and Accountability
Title VIII – Payment, Clearing and Settlement Supervision
Title IX – Investor Protections and Improvements to the Regulation of Securities
Title X – Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection
Title XI – Federal Reserve System Provisions
Title XII – Improving Access to Mainstream Financial Institutions
Title XIII – Pay It Back Act
Title XIV – Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act
Title XV – Miscellaneous Provisions
Title XVI – Section 1256 Contracts
Back in December of 2014, as part of the contentious battle to get a federal budget passed, the financial industry successfully lobbied to get rid of a provision requiring them to “push out” derivatives trading.
The Federal Trade Commission hasn’t even finished writing up the rules that are to accompany Dodd-Frank.
I’m no banking expert and I don’t know if some of the rules are onerous or not. A lot of rule-making is complicated and dense and not all of it makes sense. But I don’t trust the financial industry at all. I believe that they’ve been looking to bend the rules from the moment the legislation was signed. I understand that a lot of financial industry types genuinely don’t understand why so many of us despise their industry.
And with Congress being bought and sold like cheesy items at a flea market, it’s not like our trust is going to be enhanced anytime soon.