CEI has fought excessive regulation in the financial sector from laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank. We have scored major bipartisan victories for deregulation. These include the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, signed by President Obama in 2012, that lifted or relaxed some of the biggest burdens preventing small and midsize firms from raising capital and going public; and the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, signed by President Trump in 2018, that lifted some of Dodd-Frank’s crushing burden on community banks and credit unions. We continue to fight to remove regulatory barriers that limit choices and increase costs for entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers.
Banking and Finance Issue Areas
Featured Posts
News Release
Federal Reserve keeps interest rates steady, higher inflation likely to continue: CEI analysis
The Fed has decided to keep interest rates steady, with inflation still too high to warrant rate cuts. With Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s term…
News Release
SEC to seek end to quarterly reporting mandate: CEI analysis
The Securities and Exchange Commission will propose to end mandatory quarterly reporting for public companies, and give companies the option to file semi-annually instead, according…
The National News Desk
Inflation steady in February, but war risks new price surge
The National News Desk cited CEI’s expert on CPI data “The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the greater the upward pressure on energy…
Search Posts
Op-Eds
Google And The Antitrust Case Against Antitrust
Now that the economy has recovered to robust health and unemployment is back below 5%, the U.S. Senate has ample time and resources to spend…
Texas Insider
Is Administration Going to Use GM to Distract from Solyndra Failure?
Texas Insider
Putting the Jobs Cart Before the Growth Horse
Among the colossal fallacies that keep our economy mired in unemployment, few loom as large as the notion that “creating” jobs leads to growth and…
Texas Insider
Liberate the Jobs!
The most fascinating aspect of House Speaker John Boehner’s very effective address to the Economic Club was not the specific solutions he presented but the…
Texas Insider
Anti-Immigration Laws Hurt Economy
Arizona’s immigration laws — Senate Bill 1070 and the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) — were designed to drive undocumented immigrants out of the…
Texas Insider
Is Obama Ready to Drop Sarbanes?
In U.S. President Barack Obama’s 33-minute speech to Congress on job creation, one sentence was worth nearly all the rest of his 4,000 words. In…
Washington Times
In Wake of Quake, Californians Would Benefit Most From ‘Affordability Act’
Washington Times
Will Obama and Congress Slay the Sarbox Job-Killing Monster?
In President Obama’s 33-minute-long speech to Congress on job creation, one sentence was worth nearly all the rest of his 4,000 words. In the…
News Release
CEI Praises Obama’s Review of Sarbanes-Oxley Overregulation
Washington, D.C., September 14, 2011—Hours before President Obama’s address to Congress last week, scholars from the Competitive Enterprise Institute presented a “Ten-Point Plan…
Washington Times
Did Feminist Groups Derail the Stimulus Bill?
Washington Times
Nice Talk. When’s the Jobs Speech?
Hauling the United States Senate and a reluctant House together to listen to you on NFL kickoff night–when it’s not even State of the…
Washington Times
A Plan Better than Obama’s to Create Jobs
Washington Times
Obama Administration Planning to Freeze Foreclosures
Washington Times
California’s Big Deal Bought on Amazon
All eyes are on the California statehouse today. On the table is a deal between online retail juggernaut Amazon and California lawmakers to postpone a…
Washington Times
Obama’s Costly, Unaffordable, Harmful New Stimulus: The “American Jobs Act”
National Review
What the President Should Say Tonight
National Review
Obama’s Jobs Agenda: An Infrastructure Bank that Robs You
I stopped by our bank Friday to get something notorized, and, damn, they were all out of free Jolly Ranchers. For a moment, I’d forgotten…
Orange County Register
Cellphone Merger a Good Call
Ecomerce Times
AT&T May Have to Break Out Its Dancing Shoes
Yahoo! News
Challenge To T-Mobile Deal Brings Out Fans and Critics
News Release
Zero August Job Growth Reflects Anti-Business, Red Tape Climate in Washington
Washington, D.C., September 2, 2011 — Today’s job numbers from the US Department of Labor are downright dismal: the economy failed to add new…
Los Angeles Times
U.S. Fears Lost Jobs If AT&T Merger is Approved
Los Angeles Times
The Day After: More Reaction To DoJ’s AT&T/T-Mobile Civil Suit
RBR
AT&T Vows to Pursue T-Mobile Merger Despite DOJ block
E Week
U.S. Suit to Block ATandT, T-Mobile Deal Draws Sharp Interest Group Reaction
Citation
Green Crony Capitalism
"Green" jobs Created by the stimulus are shutting down after the public money has dried up. CEI Senior Fellow Chris Horner explains how many jobs would…
E Week
Justice’s New War Against Lenders
Daily Caller
The DOJ’s Antitrust Seers
The philosopher Yogi Berra once said that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Let’s apply his lesson to the proposed $39…
Daily Caller
Do We Really Need a National Weather Service?
CEI Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray knows that up-to-the-minute weather information is too crucial to leave in the hands of government. He argues that…
Daily Caller
Letter Writer Wrong About Hoover’s Tactics
A recent letter writer erred in claiming that Herbert Hoover cut taxes and government spending in the Great Depression (“O’Reilly Missed Lesson on Great Depression,”…
Daily Caller
Rekindling the Dream
Martin Luther King Jr. is now memorialized with an imposing statue on the D.C. National Mall. While the honor is long overdue, his legacy should…
Red State
$500,000 of Green for Green Jobs, Red for the Rest of Us
Red State
Debt Downgrade: Why Did It Take S&P So Long?
Now that Standard & Poor’s has downgraded America’s government credit rating, the real questions everyone should be asking are: What took them so long, and…
Red State
The Government War on Young Enterprise
Let’s start in Britain so we can see where we’re going. The first thing to know is…
Red State
Hoover’s Budget Wasn’t Balanced
David Elbert made the dubious claim that President Herbert Hoover “was a firm believer in balanced budgets” (“Obama’s Situation Looking a Bit Like Hoover’s,”…
Study
Stealing You Blind
Remember when we used to call government employees “public servants”? They’re servants no more—now they’re bureaucratic masters of the universe, claiming inflated salaries and early…
Red State
Dodd-Frank Side Effect: Devastation of Congo.
Townhall
The War on Lemonade
America is a country founded on entrepreneurship and free enterprise. That’s why one of its most enduring childhood traditions is the lemonade stand. It teaches…
Blog
Obamacare Costs Additional $50 Billion a Year More Than Predicted, Based on Yet Another False Assumption in Calculating its Costs
“Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts…
Townhall
The S&P Downgrade Last Friday Night vs. Katy Perry
[F]airly interpreted, “Say’s law of markets” survives as the most fundamental “economic law” in all economic theory. It enunciates the principle that “demands in general”…
Townhall
Down on the Downgrade?
The downgrade itself was fair. However, S&P’s timing and “partisan gridlock” rationale were questionable, as is its implicit advocacy of higher taxes. Nothing really…
Study
Michigan’s Insurance Industry: New Directions
Full Document Available in PDF With the coming of the administration of Republican Governor John Engler in 1991, Michigan’s…
Townhall
The Growth Agenda and Its Enemies
Even President Obama now seems to realize that rescuing America from its financial crisis requires getting Americans back to work. What he doesn’t seem to…
Townhall
S&P’s Regulatory Politics
Within 24 hours, the Obama administration went from attacking Standard & Poor’s first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt to almost embracing it. On the Friday night…
Townhall
Women in the Boardroom
SIR – From an American legal perspective, laws that mandate quotas for women on corporate boards in some European countries seem utterly bizarre (“The…
Wall Street Journal
Notable & Quotable
National Review
When Obama Hands You Lemons…
Washington Examiner
Morning Examiner: Democrats Shut Down FAA Over Morgantown Air Pork
Washington Examiner
Unlawful to Favor Women-Owned Businesses
“Men need not apply” (Commentary, Wednesday) was right to criticize the federal government’s award of contracts based on sex in the Women-Owned Small Business…
Letters
Letter to Assistant AG on Microsoft Settlement
The staff of the Antitrust Division has designated a limited set of comments on the proposed settlement as “major.” It plans to engage in special…
