Five years after the financial crash, most congressional Democrats seem content to live with the status quo. They tackled financial reform in 2010 when they passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and they'd prefer to leave the nitty-gritty details of keeping banks in check to federal agencies rather than pass new legislation.
But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won't be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and Senate aides that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. "Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?" she said. "I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That's what oversight means. And that's certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis."
But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won't be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and Senate aides that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. "Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?" she said. "I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That's what oversight means. And that's certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis."