Dodd Frank Essay

On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which is commonly referred as the Dodd-Frank Act. This act was passed as a response to the Great Recession in order to prevent potential financial debacle in the future. This regulation has a significant impact on American financial services industry by placing major changes on the financial regulation and agencies since the Great Depression. This paper examines the history and impact of Dodd-Frank Act on American financial services industry.

The Glass-Steagall Banking Act was passed to insure people’s money if a bank fails. FDR reassured the nation about the banks by broadcasting a series of “fireside chats”. The Securities and Exchange Commission law was passed to regulate stock market.

A survey of 37 economists conducted by the University of Chicago in 2014, for example, found that nearly all believed that without the stimulus, the unemployment rate would have risen higher than it did.” In addition to this, President Obama strategized new regulations to protect consumers and to prevent another financial crisis. In 2009 and 2010, he signed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and the Consumer Protection Act into law. The CCARD Act restricted and obligated interest rates on credit card companies and obligated them to enact transparent policies. The Dodd-Frank created the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which could disintegrate banks if it was possible to fail for any reason including but not limited to subprime loans.

Dodd-Frank is the latest financial reform passed by Congress, and by far the most extensive. According to Amadeo, Dodd-Frank is “the most comprehensive reform since the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933” (2012, para.1). The goals of Dodd-Frank are to implement consumer protections, end bailouts with tax payer money, create a council to identify risks, eliminate loopholes for risky behavior, implement say on pay for executives, protect investors, and enforce strict regulations on Wall Street (House of Representatives, n.d.). Dodd-Frank lacks clarity and is lengthy, running over 1,000 pages long (New York, 2012). In many cases, Dodd-Frank does not contain explicit rules, but instead creates an outline whereby financial oversight agencies have been charged with conducting research and writing and implementing the rules.

The purpose of Dodd-Frank Act is focused on restrictions on the banking sector; repealing Dodd-Frank will enable the financial market to return to a more volatile state. Moreover, the purpose of the Volker Rule is to prohibit banks from proprietary trading and restrict banks investments in hedge funds and private equity funds to prevent banks from high-risk trading activities. Therefore, from the lessons we all have learned during the 2008 financial crisis, we should not reduce government regulation in the financial sector. Instead, we should maintain our policies, continue to monitor the health of our economy, and prevent corporate misconduct. In addition, I will recommend Mr. Sessions continue to follow the Yates Memo to hold executive level individuals accountable for their misconduct. And I will also support Senator Warren's proposed 21st Century Class Steagall-Act of 2017. This act will protect our economy by restricting the bank's ability to engage in high-risk activities, reducing the size of "too big to fail" corporations, and minimizing the probability of government bailout. As one might be expected, my recommendation to Mr. Sessions will face a lot of setbacks. However, as a public servant, protect the law, maintain its fairness regardless the areas

The emergency legislation that was passed within days of President Franklin Roosevelt taking office in March 1933 was just the start of the process to restore confidence in the banking system. Congress saw the need for substantial reform of the banking system, which eventually came in the Banking Act of 1933, or the Glass-Steagall Act. The bill was designed “to provide for the safer and more effective use of the assets of banks, to regulate interbank control, to prevent the undue diversion of funds into speculative operations, and for other purposes.” The measure was sponsored by Sen. Carter Glass (D-VA) and Rep. Henry Steagall (D-AL). Glass, a former Treasury secretary, was the primary force behind the act. Steagall, then chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, agreed to support the act with Glass after an amendment was added to permit bank deposit insurance.1 On June 16, 1933, President Roosevelt signed the bill into law. Glass originally introduced his banking reform bill in January 1932. It received extensive critiques and comments from bankers, economists, and the Federal Reserve Board. It passed the Senate in February 1932, but the House adjourned before coming to a decision. It was one of the most widely discussed and debated legislative initiatives in 1932.

In 2007-2008 the US went into a recession, a financial crisis that has since then taken five years to rebuild. During that time millions of Americans were unemployed and faced many economic struggles which negatively impacted the real estate market causing a multitude of foreclosures. The reason for this recession was because there was no authority over banks and they were not being monitored properly. Banks were able to gamble with the finances of millions of people with no consequences towards their actions. The Dodd Frank Act Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 was put into place to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again; The Dodd Frank Act implemented and set laws into place to make sure that banks and financial

In 2008, the housing market crashed and America fell into a recession. Many Americans lost their homes. Many investors lost large sums of money, and overall the economic recession hurt America as a whole. Today, we see that the stock market is more regulated than it was in 1929 with the Great Depression and 2008 with the Great Recession, but it is still not regulated as much as it previously was. In 1999, portions of the Banking Act of 1933, more commonly known as the the Glass-Stegall Act, were repealed. The repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act in 1999 sparked the Housing Crisis of 2005 and ultimately led to the Great Recession that America experienced in the 2000’s.

The Glass Steagall Act was passed on 1933, which is also known as The Banking Act to tighten regulation on the way banks did their business. This act was written as an emergency measure when about 5,000 banks failed during the Great Depression. Banks mostly failed because of the way they would invest with money. The act prohibits banks from investing money on investments that turn out to be risky. Banks could no longer sell securities or bonds. The act also created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect the deposits of individuals, which is still used to this date. The FDIC in this era insures your deposits in your bank up to $250,000. This gave the public confidence again to deposit their money in the bank. In 1933

The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a sprawling global bank, in September 2008 almost brought down the world’s financial system. Considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great depression of the 1930s. Economist Peter Morici coined the term the “The Great Recession” to describe the period. While the causes are still being debated, many ramifications are clear and include the failure of major corporations, large declines in asset values (some estimates put the drop in the trillions of dollars range), substantial government intervention across the globe, and a significant decline in economic activity. Both regulatory and market based solutions have been proposed or executed to attempt to combat the causes and effects of the crisis.

The banking industry as a whole after the stock market crashed was going bankrupt due to not being able to carry the “bad debt” that was created from using customer money to buy stock. Because the banks were out of money, they were unable to cover customer withdrawals from their bank, causing many bank customers to lose all of their savings. With the uncertainty of the future of the banking industry, many people withdrew all of their savings, which caused more than 9,000 banks to close their doors and go out of business (Kelly). Due to the effects of the Great Depression, and the collapse of the banking industry, the government created regulations to prevent similar failure in the future. For Example, the SEC, (or Securities Exchange Commission), which regulates the sell and trade of stocks, bonds and other investments was created as a result of The Great Depression. The FDIC (or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), was created to insure bank accounts so that that the consumer would be protected if the bank were to go out of business (Kelly). The Great Depression's effect on the banking industry led to many useful changes to the banking industry and helped restore confidence in banks in the American people.

The banking crisis of the late 2000s, often called the Great Recession, is labelled by many economists as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Its effect on the markets around the world can still be felt. Many countries suffered a drop in GDP, small or even negative growth, bankrupting businesses and rise in unemployment. The welfare cost that society had to paid lead to an obvious question: ‘Who’s to blame?’ The fingers are pointed to the United States of America, as it is obvious that this is where the crisis began, but who exactly is responsible? Many people believe that the banks are the only ones that are guilty, but this is just not true. The crisis was really a systematic failure, in which many problems in the

One of the primary factors that can be attributed as to have led the recent financial crisis is the financial deregulation allowing financial institutions a lot of freedom in the way they operated. The manifestation of this was seen in the form of:

The worst of the crisis begin with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the most famous investment firms on Wall Street with a 158-year old history. After Lehman Brothers announced it was filing for Chapter 11, "seemingly every day for about month, a different legendary financial company teetered on collapse. Stocks recorded some of their most dramatic drops in history, including the Dow's epic 778-point drop on Sept. 29 -- the biggest ever single-day slide. And lawmakers worked overtime in an effort to stem off a failure of the financial system" (The crisis: A timeline, 2008, CNN: 1). Yet critics of the government's response to the crisis noted that had the government taken equally vigilant steps to policing the housing and financial markets earlier, the crisis would have never grown so dire.

It’s been eight years since the 2008 global financial crisis, and the effects of it are still being felt. The crisis was initiated by a housing bubble in the United States that popped, causing a downward spiral that led to the worst depression since The Great Depression of 1929-39. This resulted in millions of people loosing their homes and jobs. Over the years, research and documentaries such as Inside Job, have shed light on what exactly caused this whole crisis, and what policies were implemented to fix it. If we could point to the single biggest cause of the 2008 financial crisis, I would argue it was the complete deregulation of the financial industry. Everything else that contributed to crisis was a result of financial deregulation. These include: low-interest rates, sub-prime mortgages, securitization—collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs), rating agencies, and insurance companies.