Congress Just Voted to Repeal a Few Bits of Dodd-Frank
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stays, but Obama-era regulations that suffocated small banks are toast.
Reason cited John Berlau on the boon to small banks in being able to provide financial relief to Americans that is occuring with deregulation of Obama-era financial regulations which pressured small banks by regulating them at the same standard as larger banks.
Congress voted Tuesday to roll back some Obama-era financial regulations. It’s a significant policy change for small banks that had been unduly burdened by those federal rules, and a symbolic victory for Republicans.
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Other major parts of the Dodd-Frank law remain unchanged, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the so-called Durbin Amendment, which imposed price controls on debit card fees and has been blamed for reducing the availability of free checking accounts.
“The bill’s major accomplishment is some much-needed tailoring of regulation to a financial institution’s size so that hometown banks and credit unions are no longer regulated like Wall Street behemoths,” says John Berlau, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “To provide real financial relief for Americans, much more is required of Congress, the president and regulatory agencies.”
The Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents small banks, celebrated the passage of the bill. Community banks have struggled to comply with the 27,000 new regulations included in the 2010 law’s 800-plus pages.