Financial Reform Moves Forward
Source: Markets Media Online – June 25, 2010
By: Terry Flanagan
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The U.S. financial reform legislation that moved forward last week was not as bad as it could have been for banks and Wall Street firms, but the industry should not exhale too deeply, because the implementation of the new rules will present its own set of challenges.
“It could have been worse, but I think other side is that there is still a long way to go with this legislation,” Ron Wince, chief executive officer of management consultant Guidon Performance Solutions, told Markets Media on Friday. “When you have 2,000 pages, there is so much uncertainty, and a lot of unknowns that we don’t know but we will learn over the next couple months.”
Late last week, lawmakers from the U.S. House and Senate reached deals on a financial regulatory reform bill that is aimed at closing regulatory gaps and curtailing speculative trading practices. The bill includes a provision to limit trading by banks for their own account, and mandates that banks split off derivatives businesses into separate subsidiaries. It also creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will set rules and hold some enforcement power over banks and other financial firms.
“There are some positives for everyone -- it is not overly heavy-handed but it does provide some protections,” Wince said. “The actual ‘reform after the reform’, that is, how we implement this, is still to be decided. Now that the legislation is written the wait-and-see unfolds. There is a lot of heavy lifting yet to be done.”
Wince said that larger banks may best manage under the new rules because they have shown an ability to be innovative and creative while being heavily regulated. Smaller banks are also highly regulated, though they have fewer resources to deal with new regulation.
“The real smaller organizations, for example the check-cashing industry, may have a hard time dealing with the new regulatory environment where they had been mostly left alone,” Wince said, adding that may touch off consolidation in that space.
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