Dodd-Frank Won't Stop 'Too Big To Fail' Banks, Public Poll Says

Poll Results: Dodd-Frank Does Not Prevent “Too Big to Fail”

Posted by admin on April 9, 2012 Comments Off

A new poll from American Banker shows that 57% of Americans believe that the Dodd-Frank Act has not given regulators the power to let big banks fail.  Rather, they believe that the biggest banks are bigger than ever and crisis management is more political than ever.

Picture credit AmericanBanker.com

The poll comes in the wake of a massive slowdown in Dodd-Frank-related rulemaking (though some rules are still trickling down from financial regulators, such as last week’s final rule issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regarding record-keeping and firewall requirements for swap dealers) and a new public-relations campaign by the Federal Reserve, designed to bring the shadowy agency more into the public eye to increase confidence.
Some believe that this lack of confidence in the Dodd-Frank Act and federal regulators is thanks in large part to the massive lobbying efforts of large banks.  Alexander Eichler of HuffingtonPost.com notes that “Wall Street has done its part to make sure Washington waters down financial reform as much as possible, enacting a major pushback against the regulatory package. Indeed, in one 12-month period, lobbyists from Goldman Sachs alone were showing up on Capitol Hill an average of once every four days — and the actual implementation is running conspicuously behind schedule, with regulators missing more than a hundred deadlines for putting rules on the books thus far.”
Dodd-Frank Won't Stop 'Too Big To Fail' Banks, Public Poll Says