House Financial Services Committee Continues Efforts to Chip Away at Dodd-Frank
The House Financial Services Committee voted Wednesday to approve several measures that would scale back provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
As lawmakers prepare for the bill’s July 21, 2011 implementation date, House Republicans passed several measures narrowing the scope of the bill, including a measure that would exempt companies that manage up to $50 million in securities from having to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission; a bill exempting most private equity fund advisers from having to register with the SEC; a bill repealing the provision in Dodd-Frank requiring publically-traded companies to disclose their employees’ median compensation separately from their CEO pay packages; and a bill creating a legal framework for the use of covered bonds.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) said that all of the bills were designed to create jobs. Reps. David Schweikert (R-AZ), Robert Hurt (R-VA) and Nan Hayworth (R-NY), who introduced three of the provisions, said their bills remove burdensome regulations that are both costly and unnecessary for small businesses.
Throughout the markup, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), ranking member of the committee and one of the architects of Dodd-Frank, expressed his frustrations with the various new provisions and made several failed attempts to amend them. When House Republicans said that they were concerned about finding sufficient funding for the SEC to fulfill all of its new regulatory obligations, Frank said that Congress should not scale back regulation because of budgetary limitations, citing the cost of the war in Afghanistan, and saying that the Congress can certainly find the necessary funding for the regulatory agencies. He went on to say that the costs of failing to regulate the financial markets are significantly higher.
