Still at it
June 24, 2010 | federal legislation, industry | Comments (0)Ezra Klein, Washington Post blogger, just posted this:
Lawmakers scrambled Thursday to solidify a series of political deals in an effort to get a bill that would overhaul the nation’s financial regulation to President Obama by July 4.
As the House-Senate conference committee played out its endgame, Democratic leaders spent much of the day negotiating behind the scenes over a pair of divisive issues — bank trading and derivatives — in a bid to win crucial votes for the final legislation in both houses of Congress.
Lawmakers worked Thursday evening to find a compromise on the “Volcker rule,” named after former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The measure could bar banks from trading with their own money, a practice known as proprietary trading.
Senate Democrats proposed legislation previously offered by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would ban certain forms of proprietary trading and forbid firms from betting against securities they sell to clients. The Merkley-Levin measure never got a vote on the Senate floor.
“One goal of these limits is to reduce participation in high-risk activity that can cause significant losses at institutions which are central to the financial system,” said the Senate banking committee’s chairman, Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.). “A second goal is to end the use of low-cost funds, to which insured depositories have access, from subsidizing high-risk activity.”
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