Insights

Patomak CEO’s Take on the Treasury Capital Markets Report: a Positive Step Toward Reform, Some Weaknesses Still Need to be Addressed

Today, Patomak Global Partners CEO Paul Atkins released a review of the Department of Treasury’s recently-released report on capital markets regulation. After eight years of anemic economic growth, due largely to increased barriers to small business financing and accelerating regulatory complexity, Treasury’s report sets forth a pragmatic approach to improving capital formation, expanding investor choice, and simplifying regulations. The report was issued in response to a February Executive Order that requires Treasury to identify policies that could advance, or conflict with, the President’s “Core Principles” on financial regulation. These Principles include making regulation efficient, empowering American investors, ending taxpayer-funded bailouts, and improving the regulatory process.  

Overall, the Report should give investors, consumers, workers, small businesses, and the financial industry alike reason for optimism. Its recommendations on expanding access to capital, securitization, and regulatory processes, Atkins writes, neatly align with the President’s objectives. The report’s recommendations on derivatives and equity market structure also largely go in the right direction.

Atkins notes, however, that the report’s section on so-called financial market utilities accepts failed regulatory approaches that are antithetical to the Core Principles. He also writes that some of the report’s recommendations related to derivatives and equity market structure are weak or misguided.

Moving forward, Atkins encourages Treasury to embrace needed reforms to financial market policies that conflict with the President’s Core Principles in its future reports on asset management, insurance, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and OLA. Treasury should announce that it will drop its ongoing appeal of the strong March 2016 MetLife v. FSOC court ruling that limits one of FSOC’s sweeping powers to designate firms “systemically important” – an anti-competitive and costly “too-big-to-fail” label that brings about moral hazard and adds next to nothing to make the financial system more “stable.” Treasury should also endorse Congress’s effort to rein in FSOC’s full suite of designation powers and end taxpayer-funded OLA bailouts.

Click through to read the full analysis.

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