![]() ![]() ![]() (They subsequently grew to $110 billion.) But on Monday Frank told The Wall Street Journal that “nobody has shown me any evidence of systemic or other kinds of fraud that would have been prevented” had the 2018 bill not been passed. And anyway, Signature’s assets when Frank came on board were well below even the $50 billion threshold. This position, Frank maintained, predated his joining Signature.įrank is, in my experience, pretty forthright, so I’m inclined to believe that he really did want to raise the threshold before he joined Signature’s board. Even though the famously liberal Frank opposed the bill, he wrote that he favored raising the $50 billion threshold (to $100 billion, not $250 billion). The Democrats received some cover from former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, co-author of Dodd-Frank and, since 2015, a board member at Signature Bank, which has paid him $2.4 million over the past eight years.* Frank wrote an op-ed two months before the 2018 rollback. Maine’s Senator Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted with the banks. The deregulation bill won 33 Democratic “ayes” in the House (including then-Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) and 16 in the Senate (including, of course, West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin, but also Colorado’s Michael Bennet, Virginia’s Tim Kaine, and Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow). You can’t make this stuff up.)īut a lot of Democrats voted in 2018 with the banks too. (Jones, a frequent Trump critic who opposed the 2017 tax cut because it increased the deficit, would die the following year from Lou Gehrig’s disease.) For all their blather about economic populism, Republicans still vote in lockstep with the banks except when they want to accuse them of being too “woke.” (The only Republican criticism thus far of the bank failures is that the banks were too darned focused on putting Black and LGBT folks on their boards. ![]() Jones of North Carolina, voted against it in the House. It’s no surprise that not a single Republican voted against the bill in the Senate and that only one, Representative Walter B. Congress passed the bill anyway, 67–31 in the Senate and 258–159 in the House. The Congressional Budget Office warned Congress that the rollback bill would “increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.” So did Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. If these Dodd-Frank provisions are worth a damn, and if President Donald Trump and Congress had left well enough alone in 2018, they would have kept Silicon Valley and Signature from making the well- documented mistakes that caused them to go belly-up. And they should prepare “ resolution plans ,” commonly referred to as a “living will,” in the event of bankruptcy. They must keep more cash in reserve in the event that someone like, say, Peter Thiel should decide abruptly to pull all his money out. They must undergo annual “ stress tests ,” with the Federal Reserve assuming the role of cardiologist. These “systemically important” banks are subjected to stricter federal oversight. The main thing the 2018 rollback did was to raise, from $50 billion to $250 billion, Dodd-Frank’s asset threshold for banks whose potential failure was deemed a threat to the whole banking system. ![]()
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