The unknown
June 30, 2010 | federal legislation, industry | Comments (0)From Moneynews.com:
There’s one thing everyone can agree on about the financial overhaul agreement lawmakers reached early Friday: There’s a lot they don’t know yet.
The roughly 2,000 page bill intended to rein in risk on Wall Street and protect consumers contains nearly 400 items where regulators from various federal agencies must fill in the rules about how the law will be implemented.
Among the numerous details still to be ironed out: how mortgages will be overseen by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and how the Securities and Exchange Commission will oversee credit rating agencies.
The lack of hard-and-fast specifics may be one reason investors had a muted response to the bill: the major Wall Street indexes barely budged Friday, and bank and insurance stocks mostly rose on the day.
“We will be able to conduct a fuller assessment of its impact after the regulators issue new rules,” Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said in a statement. Similar comments came from other big banks.
It’s common for Congress to pass legislation and then leave the details to regulators, said J.W. Verret, a scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University who frequently consults with legislators and agencies on financial regulation. But with this bill, “open-ended authorizing legislation was passed at a more rapid rate than we’ve ever seen before.”
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