Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today with tremendous pride, not because the bill we are debating is my own, but because we have the chance to help Main Street businesses and roll back one of the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank. From its first addition, the Lincoln amendment, also called the swaps push-out or spin-off provision, has been hotly debated. Section 716 of Dodd-Frank initially prohibited all swaps activities. However, the conference process yielded some measure of compromise by exempting foreign exchange and interest rate swaps back in. By doing this, the conferees acknowledged that swaps are not inherently disruptive. In fact, swaps are a prudent and necessary activity for many businesses. When oil prices spike or corn prices plummet, farmers and manufacturers rely on financial products like swaps to weather the uncertainty. Many of these businesses use banks as counterparties, where they have longstanding relationships with trusted institutions. Limiting banks' ability to serve their customers will cost these customers more as they are forced to find new, less stable partners. Section 716, as it stands now, would force certain swaps out of Federal, prudential regulators' supervision and push them into affiliated entities that are not subject to the same oversight and regulation. This is why some of the loudest critics of the push-out provision have been Federal regulators, like the Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Paul Volcker.…”