"Dodd-Frank Five Years Later: Are We More Stable?" The focus of Thursday's hearing was on how the 400 new regulations enacted in the 2,300-page law is a threat to the country's financial stability.
"What is undebatable is the fact that since the passage of Dodd-Frank the big banks are now bigger; the small banks are now fewer," Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) said in his opening statement at the hearing. "In other words, even more banking assets are now concentrated in the so-called 'too big to fail' firms. Pray tell, how does this improve financial stability?"
One of the witnesses, Todd Zywicki, Professor of Law at George Mason University and Mercatus Center Senior Scholar, said that American families were not better off five years after Dodd-Frank went into law.
"Instead, the overall impact of Dodd-Frank has been to slow our economic recovery, raise prices, reduce choice, and eliminate access to the financial mainstream for American families," Zywicki said. "And low-income Americans have been hit the hardest."
Another key takeaway from Thursdays hearing is the new bureaucracies borne out of Dodd-Frank such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council operated without a system of checks and balances yet have the ability to "fundamentally alter" the U.S. economic landscape and affect the financial livelihood of millions of Americans. The "shadow regulatory system" created by Dodd-Frank poses more of a threat to the Americans' financial well-being than the "shadow banking system" does, as the Obama administration claims," according to the Committee.
The Committee also claimed at the hearing that a key portion of Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule, has caused a lack of liquidity in capital markets, which gives them less capacity to deal with economic shocks.
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