Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am in strong support of Sen. Warren's amendment to strike the unrelated swaps provision from this very important TRIA legislation. While I am sympathetic to the concerns of commercial end users about increased transactions costs, it is simply the wrong approach to prevent regulators from acting, if needed, to protect our financial system from risky transactions. We must afford our financial regulators with sufficient discretion to act to prevent more financial crises. The financial market regulators have already acted to provide relief for counterparties to swaps transactions with commercial end users. That makes the inclusion of this swaps provision in the TRIA legislation unnecessary. Sen. Warren's amendment would preserve the current regulatory approach to uncleared swaps transactions with commercial end users, while also allowing for sufficient regulatory discretion to impose margin requirements on the counter parties to these transactions in the future should it become necessary to protect our financial system. The inclusion of the swaps provision in this critically important terrorism risk insurance bill is a part of a disturbing trend. Some policymakers believe that Dodd-Frank should be undone. They believe that the derivatives reforms which for the first time regulated a market that contributed to the financial crisis should be dismantled piece by piece.…”