Posts Tagged ‘Dodd-Frank’

Banking and finance roundup

Banking and finance roundup

  • Bank of England deputy governor: banks have incurred an estimated $275 billion in legal costs since 2008 and that’s been a drag on economic growth [Katy Burne and Aruna Viswanatha, WSJ]
  • Economist Ken Rogoff proposes doing away with most large-denomination paper money so as to stifle crime, tax evasion and the like, and George Selgin of Cato pushes back;
  • “M&A Lawsuits Plunge As Delaware Judges Make Them Harder To Settle” [Daniel Fisher]
  • CFPB keeps pushing to expand its authority, but on lending rate caps it runs into a direct statutory limit [Thaya Brook Knight]
  • House Financial Services Committee votes to repeal the awful conflict minerals rule [Marcia Narine via Bainbridge and more, earlier] And maybe the rest of Dodd-Frank too? [Mark Calabria]
  • How the Swiss–American Chamber of Commerce sees FATCA, the overseas banking law vexing expats and legitimate business overseas [American Swiss Foundation]

Sorry, your cellphone game violates Dodd-Frank

The Securities and Exchange Commission has settled an enforcement action against Forcerank, LLC, a provider of a mobile phone game that enables players to engage in fantasy stock trading for a small charge, much of which was refunded to players in the form of prizes for successful predictions. The SEC takes the position that the transactions involved, however small, fall into the class of swaps and derivatives that, under Dodd-Frank, cannot be offered to the public except under intensively regulated conditions. [Stephen Quinlivan]

Banking and finance roundup

  • “Why We Could not Bail Out Mortgage Borrowers” [Arnold Kling]
  • Here come the Wall Street pay clawback rules [John Carney/WSJ MoneyBeat Blog, more, yet more] Jesse Fried on “Rationalizing the Dodd-Frank Clawback” [SSRN via Bainbridge]
  • Price controls on credit card interchange fees: “the folks who supported the Durbin amendment [to Dodd-Frank] should be ashamed of themselves” [Bill Isaac, quoted by Kevin Funnell]
  • New light on whether Treasury handling of Fannie and Freddie bailouts violated existing creditor or shareholder rights [Peter Van Doren, Cato]
  • “Dollar Value of Securities Class-Action Settlements Surges” [WSJ Law Blog on Cornerstone Research analysis, Insurance Journal]
  • Some reasons to think that actual tax evasion falls far short of what was speculated in the wake of the Panama Papers story [Tim Worstall] Legal confidentiality was breached in that episode. Should we be celebrating? [Tyler Cowen] Economist mag proposes more regulation of offshore, not so fast [Bainbridge first, second]

Banking and finance roundup

Community banker: it’s better in the U.K. at this point

“When I went to Britain I thought the regulatory environment would be much worse,” he says. “It’s infinitely better there,” says Vernon Hill, who headed for the U.K. after a career in the community bank sector in the United States. The founding of new banks has fallen virtually to zero in the U.S. since the enactment of Dodd-Frank [Stephen Moore, W$J via Kevin Funnell]

We’re from the government and we’re here to help, part 726,914

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)’s campaign against disparate impact in car loans is raising costs for some borrowers. Thanks, Sen. Warren! “The results highlight the sometimes unpredictable consequences of attempts to regulate lending practices…. Efforts by the CFPB to police the fairness of auto loans have accelerated in recent years under Director Richard Cordray.” [Morningstar/Dow Jones, W$J]

Banking and finance roundup

  • Marcia Narine on D.C. Circuit’s recent ruling striking down part of Dodd-Frank conflict mineral disclosure rule [Business Law Prof]
  • More on suit challenging constitutionality of FATCA, the law complicating many expatriates’ lives [Paul Mirengoff, PowerLine]
  • “Jury Will Put A Price On Terrorism — And Stick A Bank With The Bill” [Daniel Fisher, Reuters on Arab Bank settlement]
  • Operation Choke Point: “How a program meant to stamp out fraud has put a stranglehold on legitimate industries” [Reason TV video, AmmoLand on markup of Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer’s anti-Choke-Point Financial Institution Customer Protection Act]
  • Federal Reserve’s denial of core banking services to Colorado cannabis businesses: consistent with its authorizing statutes? [George Selgin/Cato, related from me on RICO suit against bankers, bonders, and others interacting with the industry]
  • “A financial system based not on … charging interest for lending … but on traditional social values”: Russia’s Orthodox Church backs interest-avoiding finance system akin to Islamic sharia finance [Bloomberg, Moscow Times]
  • Two popular views in tension with each other: “Wall Street = short term thinking” and “Wall Street spins meager current earnings into bubbles” [Kevin Erdmann via Tyler Cowen]

Thousands fewer community banks under Dodd-Frank

At last night’s Republican debate in New Hampshire, Carly Fiorina criticized how the Dodd-Frank law is strangling community banks, as well as its encouragement of yet bigger Wall Street firms and Congress’s failure to reform mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. More on community banks here, from Scott Beyer, and in several past posts. [And: Hans Bader, CEI.]

P.S. We’ve previously noted this WSJ account from March on one of the most dramatic aspects of the trend, the throttling of de novo bank formation:

Based in a rural village in the heart of Amish country, Bank of Bird-in-Hand is the only new bank to open in the U.S. since 2010, when the Dodd-Frank law was passed and enacted. An average of more than 100 new banks a year opened in the three decades before Dodd-Frank.

Banking and finance roundup

  • “Fee-shifting: Delaware’s self-inflicted wound” [Stephen Bainbridge, more] Needed: a new Delaware [Reuters] Fordham lawprof Sean Griffith fights trial bar on shareholder suits [Bainbridge, more]
  • Goodbye, insurance (hugs). I think I’ll miss you most of all. [Bridget Johnson on anti-cinema, anti-stock-trading views of radical Islamist British activist and former lawyer Anjem Choudary]
  • Rare coalition of bankers, housing advocates urges limits on mortgage-related suits [W$J]
  • “The Administrative State v. The Constitution: Dodd-Frank at Five Years” hearing includes testimony from Mark Calabria of Cato (law delegates vast authority to bureaucracy, has failed to generate clear rules for regulated parties) and Neomi Rao of George Mason (unconstitutionality of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) [Senate Judiciary Committee, related on a CFPB constitutional challenge]
  • Do-it-yourself Operation Choke Point: letter from one Illinois sheriff shut down adult-ad credit card payments [Maggie McNeill, Daniel Fisher]
  • “Obama DOJ Channels Bank Shakedown Money To Private Groups” [Dan Epstein, Investors Business Daily]
  • “The U.S. listing gap” [Doidge, Karolyi, & Stulz NBER paper via Tyler Cowen, MR]