Beware politicians whose legislation bears a grandiose title. You can be certain their schemes will accomplish the opposite of their purported intent. Such is the case with the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law one year ago today. The massive 2,300-page tome - commonly known as Dodd-Frank - promised to fix the financial system, streamline regulation and end bailouts. Like so much of President Obama’s legislative achievements, this bill promised much, delivered little and cost a great deal.
By the Government Accountability Office’s reckoning, implementation will require $1.25 billion in new spending. It’s not cheap marshaling an army of 2,800 newly minted federal bureaucrats wielding fresh power over the private sector. Over the next decade, businesses will shell out $27 billion in fees, assessments and tithes to their new regulatory masters, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
The enterprise was a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, where the feds had just bailed out the investment bankers at Bear Stearns and elsewhere. Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, and then-Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, insisted creation of agencies like the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection would crack down on Wall Street and end the ingrained idea that some firms are “too big to fail.”
The actual result has been a mountain of red tape. At least 400 new federal rules will be layered on top of existing regulations. New bureaucracies will have overlapping jurisdiction with existing regulatory bodies...
Far from getting rid of bailouts, Dodd-Frank institutionalized them. Title II empowered the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation with “orderly liquidation” authority, giving the agency discretion to intervene between a financial institution and its creditors in any way it sees fit... That means the “too big too fail” ethic still applies.
Dodd-Frank has largely severed the relationship between risk and return, which is the necessary discipline imposed by a free market. Now, the big banks get to keep the rewards, but American taxpayers bear the risk...
Dodd-Frank has been an expensive exercise in command and control by the federal government. It encourages crony capitalism while undermining free markets and limiting competition. A year later, the folly of this legislation has only grown more apparent.
"There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”
Barack Obama, 7/21/10 at the Dodd-Frank signing ceremony
President Obama has signed the financial industry regulatory overhaul – officially, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Predictably, what he said about it cannot possibly be true.
For example: “[T]hese reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history. And these protections will be enforced by a new consumer watchdog with just one job: looking out for people – not big banks, not lenders, not investment houses – looking out for people as they interact with the financial system.”
And: “[B]ecause of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. There will be no more tax-funded bailouts — period. If a large financial institution should ever fail, this reform gives us the ability to wind it down without endangering the broader economy. And there will be new rules to make clear that no firm is somehow protected because it is ‘too big to fail,’ so we don’t have another AIG.”
Note that Obama did not promise to spare the taxpayers from having to foot the bill for the government’s mistakes. He and the members in Congress know better than to make that howler of a promise. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the whoppers being told about this law is astounding.
The government cannot deliver on pledges to protect consumers in the financial markets and to shield taxpayers from bailouts. In the first instance — consumer protection — financial instruments are inherently complex and government attempts to shelter less-sophisticated investors and borrowers from all danger would either require control of products to the point of prohibiting things people want or inundating them with information until they ignore all of it because of the sheer volume. Alas, what the new law will provide consumers is a false sense security – and that’s worse than none at all...
Most generally, the new law exhibits the standard governmental hubris. Who truly believes that an army of necessarily myopic bureaucrats can ever know enough to 1) anticipate a systemic crisis and 2) do something intelligent about it in a timely way? The more centralized the power the more vulnerable we average taxpayers are. Mistakes are system-wide. The virtue of a freed market is not that it’s unregulated (it’s not) but that its radically decentralized...
It’s Dodd, by the way, who said of his bill, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” And Frank is ready to submit new legislation to fix any mistakes in the law. We’re about to have a laboratory experiment of the law of unintended consequences.
Obama said: “For years, our financial sector was governed by antiquated and poorly enforced rules that allowed some to game the system and take risks that endangered the entire economy.” The implication is now we have up-to-date rules that will be vigorously enforced. But he can’t possibly know that. Why not? Because in writing the law, Congress did not write the rules. It merely handed that job off to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in a variety of agencies.
As President Obama today signed into law the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, two words were left unspoken: Fannie and Freddie. Yet they not only played a major role in creating the housing bubble that led to the meltdown of 2008, they stand today as the primary remaining bailout debtors to the U.S. treasury.
As shown in this chart, the two bankrupt mortgage giants owe almost half — 45% — of the outstanding bailout money from the federal treasury...1. The bill doesn’t get to the root causes of the crisis. Schiff blames former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s ‘too low for too long’ interest rate policy, combined with government-guaranteed mortgages for the rise and fall of the housing market. “That’s continuing today, it’s untouched by this bill. In fact, the Fed is more reckless today with zero percent interest rates than when they were one percent,” he tells Aaron in this clip. Plus, with so many private lenders out of business, the government is guaranteeing an even greater percentage of the mortgage market and has given Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac an unlimited line of credit until 2012.
2. The law fails to end ‘Too Big to Fail.’ “This law now guarantees that in the future even if they don’t want to bailout these banks they actually have to,” Schiff protests. “Designating a federally supervised wind-down process for major financial firms, the new structure signals to creditors that lending money to large financial firms will provide more security than loaning to firms too small to qualify for the program. As a result, these firms will enjoy continued advantages in the marketplace which will ensure the continued industry dominance.”
In contrast to Schiff's warning, the law does the following, according to Reuters:
“The bill would set up an "orderly liquidation" process that the government could use in emergencies, instead of bankruptcy or bailouts, to dismantle firms on the verge of collapse.
“The goal is to end the idea that some firms are 'too big to fail' and avoid a repeat of 2008, when the Bush administration bailed out AIG and other firms but not Lehman Brothers. Lehman's subsequent bankruptcy froze capital markets.
“Under the new rule, firms would have to have 'funeral plans' that describe how they could be shut down quickly.”
3. More regulation means higher costs for smaller financial services firms, reducing competition. “All the new regulations that are going to be written pursuant to this bill are going to add dramatically to the cost of doing business that is going to disproportionally hit the smaller firms who don’t have the economies of scale,” Schiff says, including his own firm in that mix.
sourceThe law gives the government authority to take over and liquidate failing financial firms, injects transparency into transactions involving financial instruments called derivatives and will restrict banks from making risky bets with their own capital. It directs agencies to write hundreds of new rules...
Mr. Obama's choice, expected soon, will be a momentous one because the first director will have great influence over agency's direction, wielding a roughly $500 million annual budget that doesn't require approval from Congress.The new consumer regulator will be funded by the Federal Reserve and have independent powers to write and enforce rules governing how loans and other financial products are offered, bearing on everything from the type of mortgages people can get to the fees on their credit cards.
The agency will be able to enforce its rules against any bank with more than $10 billion of assets, as well as all large mortgage lenders, student-loan companies and payday-loan firms. It will have an army of examiners to probe these companies' practices. Small banks will have to follow the new rules written by the agency but they will be examined by other federal regulators.
The bureau's policies and rules could be overturned by other regulators only if they "would put the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system or the stability of the financial system of the U.S. at risk."...
Supporters said the government needed new powers to protect Americans from abusive financial practices such as hidden fees in the fine print, which they argue helped cause the financial crisis. Opponents said the agency was a sign of "nanny state" that treats regulators as better equipped than citizens to make decisions...
My thoughts: What could go wrong with a 2,000 bill with "barely understandable fine print"?
President Obama signed into law on Wednesday a sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation….
A number of the details have been left for regulators to work out, inevitably setting off complicated tangles down the road that could last for years…complex legislation, with its dense pages on derivatives practices….
“If you’ve ever applied for a credit card, a student loan, or a mortgage, you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print,” Mr. Obama said.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the bill's primary authors, would fail to end the numerous government distortions of our financial and mortgage markets that led to the crisis. Both have been either architects or supporters of those distortions. One might as well ask the fox to build the henhouse.
Nowhere in the final bill will you see even a pretense of rolling back the endless federal incentives and mandates to extend credit, particularly mortgages, to those who cannot afford to pay their loans back. After all, the popular narrative insists that Wall Street fat cats must be to blame for the credit crisis. Despite the recognition that mortgages were offered to unqualified individuals and families, banks will still be required under the Dodd-Frank bill to meet government-imposed lending quotas...
The legislation's worst oversight is to ignore completely the role of loose monetary policy in driving the housing bubble. A bubble of such historic magnitude as the one we went through can only occur in an environment of extremely cheap and plentiful credit. The ultimate provider and price-setter of that credit was the Federal Reserve. Could anyone truly have believed that more than three years of a negative real federal-funds rate — where one is essentially being paid to borrow — would not end in tears?
As the Federal Reserve's monetary policy is largely aimed at short-term borrowing, the Fed also drove the spread between short- and long-term borrowing to historic heights. This created irresistible incentives for households and companies to borrow short — sometimes as short as overnight — and lend long. Many households chose adjustable-rate mortgages that would later reset as interest rates rose, increasing monthly payments. For banks, this spread provided an opportunity for handsome profits by simply speculating on the yield curve.
The legislation will vastly reform the way big financial firms do business.
This is "reform that will prevent the kind of shadowy deals that led to this crisis, reform that would never again put taxpayers on the hook for Wall Street's mistakes," the president said last week.
The bill aims to strengthen consumer protection, rein in complex financial products and head off more bank bailouts...
The legislation would establish a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau inside the Federal Reserve that could write new rules to protect consumers from unfair or abusive practices in mortgages and credit cards.
The bill creates a new council of regulators, lead by the Treasury Department, that would set new standards for how much cash banks must keep on hand to prevent them from triggering a financial crisis. It would also establish new procedures for shutting down giant financial firms that are collapsing.
The measure would put new limits on Wall Street banks' speculative bets for their own accounts and their ability to own hedge funds, while leaving the door open for some investment activities.
