Following rollbacks of several of its key provisions in recent weeks, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act as a whole may soon be vulnerable to repeal.
House Financial Services Committee Chair Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) reportedly had finished a draft Monday evening of a bill discarding the 2010 law, which sought to correct the leading causes of the 2008 financial crisis, such as predatory lending and high-risk trading.
“Dealing with Dodd-Frank is a this-year priority,” Hensarling said Tuesday morning in an interview with CNBC, adding, however, that discarding the Wall Street reform bill would follow tax reform and an intended repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Still, in a Feb. 17 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Hensarling said a more lax replacement for the financial law, dubbed the “Financial Choice Act 2.0” and widely anticipated by financial industry lobbyists, would be made public “in the weeks to come.”
Passage of the bill would require a simple majority, or 218 of 435 votes in the House, after which it would move to the Senate, where another simple majority, or 51 of 100 votes, would allow its passage, in which case it would be sent to President Donald Trump for him to sign.
Already, major portions of Dodd-Frank have been scrapped or targeted for repeal.
Trump has issued a memorandum to Acting Secretary of Labor Edward Hugler to evaluate his Department’s so-called “Fiduciary Rule,” a Dodd-Frank measure requiring financial advisers to act in their clients’ interests rather than their own.
On Feb. 14, Trump signed a Congressional bill nullifying a measure of the 2010 law that required companies extracting oil, minerals and natural gas from foreign government lands to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission the payments they made to those countries, in the interest of national security and corruption prevention.
More recently, on Friday, Trump directed his Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin “to conduct a full review of the burdensome regulations required by the Dodd-Frank Act,” according to a White House press release. The directive followed a similar mandate in a Feb. 3 executive order from Trump, requiring Mnuchin—who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs Goup, which played a major role in the financial crisis—to report to the president “within 120 days” on ways to cut financial-sector regulation.
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