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To the extent the public is aware of the low-profile Office of Financial Research, House Republicans are working to make sure that those perceptions are negative.
April 19
The surest sign that you are losing an argument is when you resort to making things up.
By that standard, the House Financial Services Committee is losing pretty badly.
In the past 24 hours,
But the promised government savings are totally illusory and the OFR claim is both disingenuous and dishonest.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Dodd-Frank Act is perfect or that there shouldn't be efforts to guard against some of the unintended consequences from its enactment.
But the way the Financial Services Committee seems to be approaching these problems is senseless. If the panel wants to be taken seriously, this isn't the way to go.
Let's take the two issues separately.
Late Wednesday, the panel passed a bill along party lines that would repeal the government's authority to wind down large, failing financial institutions. The bill has absolutely zero chance of actually becoming law—the Senate would never approve it and President Obama would never sign it.
But this was a symbolic vote meant to show that the GOP was serious about reducing the deficit and ending government bailouts of banks. On paper, the Republicans were bolstered by the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that the Dodd-Frank resolution authority would cost the government $22 billion over 10 years.
The problem? The bill wouldn’t actually save the government anything. The
During debate on Dodd-Frank, then FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair
Instead, the final law allows the FDIC to borrow from Treasury, but then requires the agency to assess banks after the fact, recouping all costs. The CBO said last year this provision would cost the government $22 billion – but only because it was looking at the issue from a 10-year time frame, not because it did not think the government would be repaid eventually. In other words, the CBO never said that the government wouldn't get its money back, just that by the time a large failure occurred and the industry was assessed, it wouldn't happen within a decade. (The Wall Street Journal reaches the same conclusion
This does not appear to matter to Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee. Even though analysts referred to the whole thing as "
Leaving aside the issue of government savings, however, the bill is still terrible policy. Republicans claim that the legislation somehow stops government bailouts, but it's likely to engender the exact opposite or spur a market panic instead.
If the FDIC cannot seize a failing firm, regulators are left with two choices: let a firm go bankrupt, a la Lehman Brothers, or try and find a way of bailing it out.
Both choices are equally bad. Lehman’s bankruptcy nearly caused the entire financial system to melt down and directly led to government bailouts of the largest banks. Dodd-Frank was enacted to give regulators a third option: an orderly wind-down of a firm.
Republicans have now voted to repeal that part of the bill and replace it with … nothing.
That's right. If this bill became law tomorrow and a firm was failing, regulators could either try and mount a bailout – which would be more difficult now thanks to restrictions placed on the Federal Reserve Board by Dodd-Frank – or they could let it go into bankruptcy, potentially wreaking havoc on the financial system.
Does this sound like sound policy to you? If the existing bankruptcy process worked well, Lehman Brothers would have been a non-event.
As if that weren't bad enough, the Financial Services Committee followed up on Thursday by launching an attack on the Office of Financial Research.
In a
This video would be funny if it weren't so outrageous.
It shows photos of mysterious men taking pictures (presumably of average citizens) and a man standing in front of a series of television screens showing people's lives. It warns darkly of OFR's subpoena powers and concludes with the message, "The Office of Financial Research is Watching."
The average person – who has never heard of OFR before – would probably conclude that Dodd-Frank created another spy agency tasked with overseeing average Americans. Clearly this is the intent of the video.
It's also completely insane. The OFR was not created to – nor does it – oversee normal Americans. It is not spying on people, as both the title of the video and its imagery would suggest.
It is an agency designed to collect bank data and detect problems in the system. In theory, had it been in place before the financial crisis, it might have helped regulators recognize the explosive growth of subprime products and what a danger they posed.
The subpoena power mentioned in the video is against banks, not citizens, in order to enable it to have all the information it requires to find systemic risk. That doesn't mean it’s going to be rooting through your trash.
In an e-mail to me, a spokesman for the committee defended the video, insisting the panel had concerns about possible data breaches at the agency. That's actually a legitimate issue—too bad the video is so busy trying to panic people it barely mentions that concern.
I'm not saying anyone has to like the agency. I've heard sound arguments that it won't work, that more data doesn't necessarily mean better risk detection.
There's no doubt the agency is untested, and we have to wait to see just how helpful it's going to be.
But one thing it's not is some ominous government creation worthy of a
Dodd-Frank, like any big piece of legislation, offers plenty of choice targets for the House Financial Services Committee to tackle, from interchange fee restrictions to bans on proprietary trading to push-out provisions for certain activities.
But the panel is losing credibility by engaging in pointless symbolic votes and employing scare-tactics in the absence of substantive arguments.
Rob Blackwell is the Washington bureau chief of American Banker. The views expressed are his own.
