Dodd-Frank does nothing to protect investors from the systematic risk created by too big to fail banks. Wall Street banks are still swinging for the fences with their Bernanke bucks. Instead of true financial reform, DF is full of pet issues. One is to hurt energy companies that Obama targeted in his re-election campaign. As John Berlau points out in National Review Online:
Hold on. A provision targeting energy companies — in a banking bill?
In the almost three years since Dodd-Frank was rammed through Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — significant players if not the largest culprits in the mortgage crisis — are bigger than ever. The law did not lay a hand on them.
And many on both left and right say Dodd-Frank didn’t make a start on curbing the power of too-big-to-fail banks. In fact, the law’s designation of “systemically important financial institutions” through its Financial Stability Oversight Council enshrines too-big-to-fail by telling creditors which financial firms the government will spare from a normal bankruptcy.
But rest assured that Dodd-Frank is working — at great cost — to force energy companies to tell shareholders each and every payment they make to foreign governments, and all public companies to say whether they have ever used tin or tungsten from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As explained by Mercatus Center scholars Hester Peirce and James Broughel in their book Dodd-Frank: What It Does and Why It’s Flawed, the law’s “miscellaneous provisions” in Title XV offer “a clear example of how a statute invoked as the answer to the financial crisis is, in reality, an odd conglomeration of responses to issues, many of which had nothing to do with the financial crisis.”
