A little bit of Wall Street reform
Robert Weissman
Four hundred forty-two days after Lehman Brothers declared
bankruptcy, the US House of Representatives has finally passed financial
reform legislation.
The long delay between the onset of the financial crisis - a direct
consequence of a quarter century of deregulation - and the passage of
Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 did not well
serve the cause of reform.
As time passed, public anger over the Wall Street bailout became more
diffuse. And Wall Street relentlessly continued its campaign to
undermine meaningful efforts at reform.
The bill passed today contains some positive measures, but it does
not do nearly enough to rein in the Wall Street banksters. It is wholly
incommensurate with the devastation Wall Street has wreaked across the
land and planet.
Most importantly on the positive side, the bill creates a powerful
financial consumer watchdog agency. Had the Consumer Financial
Protection Agency existed during the go-go years earlier this decade, it
could have prevented millions of consumers from being ripped off - and
protected the banks from themselves. The financial crisis would have
been significantly less severe.
The bill also contains some modestly beneficial provisions
establishing liability for credit ratings firms, regulating derivatives
and imposing leverage limits on the largest institutions. And it
includes an important measure for a comprehensive public auditing of the
Federal Reserve.
But there are huge holes in the legislation. Wall Street successfully
maneuvered to keep most of the important big picture reforms off the
table.
The bill does very little to address industry structure. Wall Street
and the big banks engaged in reckless betting under the belief that they
were too big to fail - that they were protected by a federal backstop.
The biggest banks are now even bigger than they were before the crisis.
The solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to break up the big
banks, so that the system can absorb their failure. The bill fails to
impose limits on bank size.
Many news accounts misleadingly highlight that the bill gives
regulators the authority to break up big financial institutions. The
bill does confer that authority - but only upon a finding of a “grave
threat to the financial stability or economy of the United States.” It
is extraordinarily unlikely that regulators will ever reach such a
finding.
A related problem is the intermixing of commercial and investment
banking in single firms and resultant excessive risk taking by federal
insurance-backed commercial banks. The bill fails to separate commercial
and investment banking, as the Glass Steagall law did before repeal in
1999, or otherwise address this problem.
Financial derivatives and other exotic instruments - labeled by
Warren Buffett as weapons of financial mass destruction - fuelled the
crisis. The bill contains very modest regulations over financial
derivatives but leaves more than a quarter of the market free from
regulation and contains loopholes to enable another substantial chunk to
escape regulatory control.
Even for derivatives covered by the bill, the new rules are very
limited. The bill does not establish a regulated exchange for
derivatives trades. It does not ban financial instruments that do little
more than enable high-stakes gambling. And it does not require the
purveyors of derivative instruments to prove that the benefits of their
new products outweigh the costs and risks to the financial system. -
Third World Network Features
|