On the recordNovember 1, 2011
I am pleased that Senator Crapo has withdrawn his amendment, No. 814. I would have opposed this amendment because it would have brought to a screeching halt the financial reforms Congress recently enacted to end Wall Street abuses, because it would weaken capital and margin requirements to limit risk, and because it would add to the law multiple layers of complexity. Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to put a cop back on the Wall Street beat. It ended the decades of deregulation that helped unleash the forces of self-dealing and conflicts of interest that thrust our economy into the recession from which we are still digging out. The Crapo amendment would have forced the key Federal banking, commodities and securities regulators to stop issuing all regulations to implement the Dodd-Frank law until they issued a host of studies. It would have buried financial reform under an unprecedented regulatory procedure requiring piles of new paperwork. The new procedures and studies could have required years of additional delay, when Congress has already decided that financial reforms are needed now to protect the public from high risk financial activities. That was reason enough to oppose the Crapo amendment. Second, the Crapo amendment would have weakened a key set of reforms contained in the Dodd-Frank Act, requiring capital and margin requirements to reduce risk in the shadowy market in derivatives.…





