Senior White House Aide Criticizes Dodd Financial Regulatory Plan
By Corey Boles, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- A senior Obama administration official on Friday
criticized a Senate proposal to overhaul the regulation of the financial sector,
saying the creation of a single banking regulator would take too long.
Austan Goolsbee, who sits on the president's Council of Economic Advisers,
said the administration doesn't support the plan to merge existing banking
regulators into a single entity. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher
Dodd (D., Conn.) unveiled draft legislation this week overhauling the financial
industry's rulebook. A central feature to his plan would be to merge the several
federal banking regulators into one.
Goolsbee said the time it could take to create such an institution would cause
"nervousness."
He drew comparisons between Dodd's plan and the U.K.'s Financial Services
Authority, saying a single regulator in that country didn't manage to prevent a
financial meltdown in that country last year.
"As a general statement, they had a lot of problems in the U.K. as well,"
Goolsbee said.
Goolsbee said the administration believed that the Federal Reserve Board
should retain a central role in overseeing the banking sector. Dodd said this
week the Fed had been an "abysmal failure" in regulating bank holding companies.
If enacted, Dodd's legislation would remove much of the Fed's existing
regulatory powers leaving it to concentrate on monetary policy and acting as a
lender of last resort to the financial sector.
The administration has made no secret of the fact that it prefers the
regulatory overhaul proposal put forward by House lawmakers that would largely
retain the existing banking regulatory authorities and the Fed's central role.
But Goolsbee is the first senior White House figure to publicly criticize the
Dodd plan since it was made public on Tuesday. He acknowledged there was a
narrow window for the administration to complete its rewrite of the regulations
governing the industry, saying that it would only be possible to accomplish as
long the market meltdown last year continues to be prominent in the peoples'
minds.
Goolsbee was speaking at the Bloomberg Washington Summit at the Newseum.
A spokeswoman for Dodd wasn't immediately available to comment.
-By Corey Boles; Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6601; corey.boles@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
11-13-091015ET
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