The Senate voted 60 to 39 to pass the Wall Street Reform Act on Thursday afternoon, clearing the way for President Obama to sign it into law. The vote, mostly along party lines, ends a year of contentious debate on Capitol Hill, but the fierce lobbying effort by the banking industry will likely continue. Much of the details of implementation will be left up to rulemaking by the various regulatory agencies.
In New York, industry veterans and Washington insiders met Thursday morning to talk about the ramifications of the new regulations.
Gary Gensler, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the audience at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association meeting that the work was far from over. The CFTC alone has 30 areas of focus, he said. The agency will have to write the new rules within a year, possibly sooner. And Robert Cook, the head of trading and markets at the Securities and Exchange Commission, has over 100 different tasks assigned it by the bill, many of them in coordination with the CFTC.
The Dodd-Frank bill, named after its proponents in the Senate and House, is the most sweeping reform of Wall Street since the 1930s. Many bankers complain the new rules impose heavy compliance costs and business restraints that will make it harder to earn profits in the future, and and they predict a number of unintended consequences. But critics of the legislation say it stops far short of truly reining in risk taking on Wall Street.
Derivatives trading was a big focus of lawmakers. The bill requires standardized swaps to be traded on an exchange or in other centralized trading facilities, the better to promote transparency in this little-understood market. Derivatives tied to mortgage-backed securities played a key role in the financial crisis of 2008, with AIG driven to the brink of bankruptcy by bad moves in that market.
Swaps trading is a huge enterprise for the big U.S. banks, who control 97% of the trillions-dollar swaps market. Gensler has long pressed for more centralized trading of the products to promote competition and lower the risk to the system. Standardized derivatives will also have to be handled by central clearing houses, another layer of risk management.
In a win for Wall Street, a measure introduced by Sen. Blanche Lincoln requiring banks to spin off their swaps trading units was scaled back. Banks will still be able to trade swaps to hedge risk and trade interest rate or foreign exchange swaps, but dealing in riskier swaps transactions must still be moved into affiliates.
The bill also curbs proprietary trading by banks and toughens the rules regarding the quality of capital and amounts of capital banks need to hold in reserve. The government also gets new authority to take over and unwind foundering companies deemed as a systemic risk.
In the time between the signing of the bill and its implementation, banks will look to shift their businesses in directions that the new regulations can’t touch. Those directions appear to be abroad, and away from the mass-market consumer in the U.S. toward the affluent
© Forbes
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