The Dodd-Frank Act: Financial Analysis

As we all know in 2008 the economy took a huge turn for the worse. The economy had crashed, jobs were lost, companies went bankrupt, borrowing money was seized, and the United States was in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the results of the Great Recession of 2008 was the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The Dodd-Frank Act clamped down on finical institutions that had 50 billion or more dollars in assets. It created new and stricter regulations of the financial institutions to help prevent another recession. This came with its advantages and disadvantages. First, an advantage of having the restrictions set at $50 billion or more in assets is that smaller financial institutions have a little more freedom on how business is conducted. For example, Idaho Central Credit Union has $2.7 billion is assets as of September 13, 2016 and is the currently the largest Indirect Lender in Idaho, in addition, the number one mortgage lender currently in Idaho. It is tough to say if ICCU would be so successful if they had as many regulations and restrictions. Instead of focusing on growth there would be a high pressure of following regulations. On the opposite side of the spectrum the disadvantage of having the cut off at 50 billion in assets makes companies that are close to the cut off start to restrain

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 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, was created as a tool of financial reform in the legislative package that was authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act, but the law specifically includes terms that prohibit setting interest rate limits, which is contrary to the 36-percent limit that the CFPB is currently trying to mandate as a universal limit on short-term rates. The specifics of the Dodd-Frank Act, according to the www.dodd-frank-act.us, state that the legislation grants, "NO AUTHORITY TO IMPOSE USURY LIMIT" unless such a limit is first passed through due legal processes.

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.

If you listen to the news, you might hear about an economic recovery. But if you listen to your neighbors, you are probably hearing a different story.

We now know to keep financial regulations in place to prevent another economic catastrophe. After fall of 2008, the

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

However, these mortgages required no income verification, or resources to pay for the mortgage, as long as they signed the mortgage papers. Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were the lending arms that provided the money. Both are now government run, but formerly were privately held companies, unlike Ginnie Mae, which is fully backed by the government. When the homeowners could no longer pay their mortgages, the house of cards collapsed. With the lack of education in this country, the middle and lower class were greatly affected by the government’s intervention in Mortgage rates. The subprime mortgage crisis can be blamed for much of this country’s economic problems, but we don’t need to point fingers at what went wrong, we need to address the problems and find solutions.

The general objective of this policy paper is to deeply understand the latest and most influential financial reforms and the current financial environment in U.S through relatively comprehensive analysis with regard to the Dodd-Frank Act. In doing so, I move forward to provide some suggestions on improving the relevant legislature.

In the lead up to the current recession, when the real estate market began to fall, there were so many investors shorting stocks and securitized mortgage packages that were already falling, that the market simply fell further. There were no buyers at the bottom, and the professional investors made millions off of the losses of others. Beyond this, there was no real federal regulation for securitized mortgages, since there was no real way to gauge the mathematical risk of any given package. This allowed the investors to take advantage of the system and to short loans on real people’s homes. Once these securities were worthless, many of the homebuyer’s defaulted on their mortgages and were left penniless. No matter from which angle this crisis is looked at, the blame rests squarely with the managers who began the entire cycle, the ones who pursued the securitization of mortgages. Their incompetence not only led to the losses of Americans who have never invested in the stock market, but to losses for their shareholders.

After more than seven years after the financial crisis, there is a great debate among

Supposedly, Dodd-Frank lacks full implementation, providing President Trump an open door with which to shred the remaining aspects of the Act (Frean 2011). With portions of the Act already ineffective, the only effort Trump has to put into permanent dismantlement, is to ensure that they never go into effect. Interestingly enough, for agencies such as the SEC, FDIC, and CTFC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and the like, majority members are cycled out with each presidential term (Dayen 2017). The CFTC prefers a hands off approach and basically ignored the regulatory provisions of Dodd-Frank thereby proving it is not performing as it should (Fischer 2015). So hypothetically, an easy means of controlling the agencies is to control the members,

A few years later the market took a turn for the worse, where interest rates were on the rise, and homes were losing their value quickly. Now borrowers that were in these interest only ARM’s needed to refinance these loans because the rates were going up, to a point where the homeowner was not be able to afford the payment. The Federal Reserve tried to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates during the recession in early 2001, from over 6% in 2000, to a rate just above 1.25% in 2002. These low rates encouraged many Americans to apply for loans for homes that a few years ago they would have not been able to. To encourage the homeownership boom, the Bush administration urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to allot more money for low-income borrowers so they could buy their own homes. This resulted in the subprime mortgage

Yes we need to have some form of regulation. The proposed regulation is not bad as it covers most of the recommendations discussed in this write up earlier. It reinforces the regulatory role as outlined earlier and requires improving the capital requirements as well as the risk management systems in place in financial institutions. At the same time the focus is mostly on large, complex financial institutions that have a systematic impact so it allows some flexibility particularly for smaller and medium size financial institutions.

Everybody in the United Stated was affected by the recession that began in December of 2007 and spanned all the way to June 2009. Even though the recession is over, many people are still being affected by it and have still not been able to recover from the great recession. “The recent recession features the largest decline in output, consumption, and investment, and the largest increase in unemployment, of any post-war recession”. Many people lost their jobs due to the recession and some of them are still having a hard time finding jobs and getting back on their feet. Businesses