Comment by Jim Campbell
Look no further than the election website of Senator Diane Feinstein to understand how she is the gift that just keeps giving.
Washington—Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and four colleagues today sent a bipartisan letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) urging the agencies to take necessary actions to begin the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The statutory deadline to establish limits on energy market speculation was January 2011.
Since then, the CFTC has issued a regulation creating these limits, but they will not be enforced until “swaps” are defined. The CFTC and SEC have been drafting these definitions since September 2010.
The Dodd-Frank legislation signed into law by Barack Obama is woeful and of course has the unintended consequence of hurting the tax payer.
In today OPEd at the Wall Street Journal the law is taken apart and rightly so. “The SEC Does Dodd-Frank”
Elizabeth Emken would have nothing to do with Dodd-Frank as it his contrary to her position and policy paper on, ” Reducing the Burden and Regulation” placed on the business man and worker stifling job creation.
WSJ OpEd
Two new rules that raise business costs, no rule for easier job creation.
The damage from the 2010 Dodd-Frank law continues to roll through the economy, arriving Wednesday with a thud at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In a 3-2, party-line vote, commission Democrats finalized a “conflict minerals” rule that will add costs to the economy with no tangible benefit, while they delayed a regulation that would help job creation.
The SEC ruled that starting in 2014 companies will have to disclose to the public when they use gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Members demanded the new mandate as part of Dodd-Frank to feel good about doing something about the ugly fighting there.
But the main impact so far has been to hurt not the rebels but the mine workers who have been laid off because companies are steering clear of anything produced in the region. That may be why the SEC couldn’t estimate benefits on this point.
The rule will certainly cost shareholders. The SEC initially estimated the rule would cost $71 million but now says companies will spend $3 billion to $4 billion to implement the new rule and then an additional $206 million to $609 million in annual compliance. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts the implementation figure closer to $16 billion. Entire story below.
Under a separate new “extractive” rule also passed Wednesday, U.S. companies will also have to publicly disclose when they pay governments to develop natural resources. The SEC could have used its discretion to allow companies to report these figures privately and then publicly report aggregate numbers. So now foreign competitors will be able to see competitive data from U.S. companies without having to return the favor.
Meanwhile this week, the SEC delayed its consideration of a rule under the new Jobs Act that would make it easier for young companies to raise private capital. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act makes such modest reforms as lifting the small-offering registration threshold to $50 million from $5 million, raising arbitrary limits on the number of investors who can own shares before a company must register, and reforming “general solicitation” rules to let companies pitch to a broader pool of sophisticated investors.
The SEC staff has never liked the law, and agency chief Mary Schapiro objected to it in March. But Congress ignored her, and President Obama signed it in a rare bipartisan victory. The law gave the SEC until July to write the new rule, but now the SEC says it wants to go through a formal public comment period that could delay the bill for months—until Ms. Schapiro leaves the agency.
Ms. Schapiro has shown at the SEC that she is keenly attuned to political pressure, and in this case she is bending to her own staff, as well as to consumer groups, state regulators and the AFL-CIO. All of them claim the Jobs Act exposes investors to fraud, but they offer more assertion than evidence. They’ve also forgotten that the act doesn’t water down any state or federal antifraud laws.
In early 2011, President Obama famously promised regulatory relief, but the new and costly rules keep coming thanks to the liberal legislative bonanza of his first two years. The SEC’s mission is to protect investors and “facilitate capital formation.” This week it did little to further either goal, but it did add regulatory costs that will waste capital and cost American jobs.