Obama to Meet with Regulators on Dodd-Frank Law Status

By | August 19, 2013

President Barack Obama will sit down with the leading U.S. financial market regulators on Monday to discuss their progress in implementing the 2010 Wall Street reform law, the White House said on Sunday.

The Dodd-Frank law was passed by the then-Democratic-controlled Congress with Obama’s support as a response to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. It aims to prevent large, complex financial firms from imperiling markets should they collapse.

It imposed new rules for over-the-counter derivatives, required banks to hold more capital, established a new federal agency charged with protecting consumers from predatory lending and laid out a series of reforms targeting numerous other financial firms, such as hedge funds and private equity funds.

The White House said it expects the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Federal Housing Finance Agency and the National Credit Union Administration to attend the meeting Monday afternoon.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will also participate, the Treasury Department said on Sunday.

Although the Dodd-Frank legislation was signed into law by Obama more than three years ago, many of the rules have yet to be completed.

The CFTC has made arguably the most progress of any regulator, finalizing the majority of the rules for the over-the-counter derivatives marketplace. Most of the other regulators still have a relatively long way to go.

As of July 15, the law firm Davis Polk found that a total of 279 Dodd-Frank rulemaking requirement deadlines had passed. Of those, only 38.4 percent were met with finalized rules, while a total of 61.6 percent were missed.

Among the major outstanding regulations that must be completed include rules targeting asset-backed securities markets, credit-rating agencies and the Volcker rule, a measure named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker that restricts banks from engaging in proprietary trading.

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