Last Wednesday, July 21, 2010, eighteen months after taking office, President Barack Obama used eleven pens to sign into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. In the tradition of many Presidents before him, Obama made use of multiple pens. He did so to create historic artifacts – or souvenirs…
Today Bloomberg has published a major story on the rapidly growing practice by life insurance companies of providing “retained asset accounts” to beneficiaries instead of paying them out with a check or depositing the funds into an FDIC-insured bank account. Beneficiaries have an account opened in their name, but not the actual funds. They then…
Under the Dodd-Frank Act the Federal Reserve is now empowered to regulate interchange fees charged by card issuers to merchants when customers use their debit cards. The Fed is required to ensure that the fees are “reasonable and proportional.” (An exception has been provided for cards issued by small banks, i.e. those with less than…
The administration and lawmakers are busy congratulating themselves on the “historic” Dodd-Frank legislation, the “toughest financial reform” since the Great Depression. Sure . . . if historic is synonymous with long, costly, needlessly complex, and likely to have little impact on systemic risk, moral hazard, or the financial market opacity that exacerbated the financial crisis.…
The seemingly impossible has happened! Congress has just passed massive financial reform legislation. The scale of reform introduced by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which is now certain to be signed into law, is literally monumental. Dodd-Frank contains by far the most sweeping set of reforms to financial activity that we…
Over the past few decades, regulators have tried to base more of their decisions on objective economic grounds, like benefit-cost analysis. In the environmental field, Douglas A. Kysar’s recent book Regulating From Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity argues that such tools can obscure (and sometimes defeat) the real purposes of regulation. A…
First, thanks to Lawrence Baxter for inviting me here. I am a big fan of the new blog and its contributors. Re-energizing the conversation about regulation is an important task. I’ll mainly talk about health care regulation, but I thought I’d start out by joining a conversation in the news: the troubling parallels between failures…
Some of my thoughts on financial reform on Hong Kong’s Radio 3 today. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments on this post
I prefer to talk policy not politics. But the fate of the financial reform legislation has become a struggle to reach 60 votes. With that pressure to find support, comes compromise, and further weakening of the already mild measures. So, this seems worthy of a brief spotlight. In a later post, I hope to identify…
follow: RSS