And you thought GLB was a fight.
To call the battle over financial services regulation “staggering” is to downplay its intensity.
There is new evidence that shows the degree to which the battle is raging. First, the Financial Stability Oversight Committee gets 1,500 comments to these questions:
How should regulators go about designating non-bank firms that are “systemically significant,” thus subjecting them to potentially more stringent oversight? And how should regulators implement the Volcker Rule, which seeks to prohibit firms from trading on their own accounts, a practice known as proprietary trading?
1,500 is a lot of comments.
But let’s put this request for comment in perspective. According to the federal government, there are now 5,340 notices, rule-changes, requests for comment, and the like related specifically to financial services. To my recollection, this is a greater amount than at any time over the last 10 years. And with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just getting started, I would expect this number of government actions to increase, perhaps exponentially.
Does the word “staggering” come to mind yet?
As a side note, check out what the City of Cambridge, Mass., just ratified.
JJ, Your point on IT is certainly our hope. I wrote a chapter on this in an upcoming book called Security 2020 on regulatory and compliance innovation. The idea would be to establish an open protocol for the exchange of regulatory information. Much like the explosion of email (in a good way) that came from SMTP and the Internet in general with the whole TCP/IP stack, open protocols lead to epic collapse (in a good way) of the data exchange costs we all bare as a tax. If we look at the costs of compliance as a tax, the banking industry is hit with something in billions of dollars annually. If one imagines the costs of the federal examination system, with food, hotels, car rentals etc., that are largely needed because of the lack of an open data exchange protocol. This standard could save the national economy a trillion dollars over a 10 year period and that’s real money.