Joe Valenti: Please stand up if you support financial deregulation

  The first 100 days of the Trump administration have had no shortage of broken promises to American workers and families. But the president’s troubling promise “to do ‘a big number’” on Dodd-Frank—the financial reform law passed in 2010—may actually be kept. Congress takes a big step toward that goal this week when the House Financial Services Committee votes on the Financial CHOICE Act, committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling’s (R-TX) bill that would largely undo financial reform. The sweeping, 593-page bill would take a wrecking ball to financial reform, undermining tools that regulators use to safeguard the financial system and decimating key consumer and investor protections.

Financial rollbacks would leave coal in consumers’ stockings

  In October, a bipartisan budget deal was announced with great fanfare: Legislators across party lines agreed to a broad framework that could stave off a government shutdown. That’s the good news.

  The bad news? The budget deal could use important consumer protections as a bargaining chip to prevent a shutdown.

Eric Alterman: The super-rich and their monster

  As Ian Reifowitz of the Daily Kos pointed out, an article in The New York Times’s business section shows that our tax system has been successfully gamed to the point where the wealthiest Americans pay a much smaller percentage of their income than salaried, middle-class taxpayers. Using 2009 IRS data—the most recent available—America’s top 400 earners, who take in an average adjusted gross income of more than $200 million, paid less than 20 percent of those princely sums to the tax man. Those who only made it into the top 1 percent of earners—a few of whom earn as little as $344,000—paid 24 percent.

Cameron Smith: Government-supervised financial sector may lose value

  JPMorgan Chase recently disclosed a $2 billion trading loss associated with its principal risk management unit. For a bank with a capital base of almost $200 billion, a loss of $2 billion is more of a grand annoyance than a “systemic risk,” but the political rhetoric has been explosive.   Despite the reality that taxpayer-backed deposits were not actually at risk, droves of politicians from the left are clamoring that JPMorgan’s loss is ample evidence that more government regulation is necessary while the political right is wavering on its commitment to repeal Dodd-Frank.

  But is federal control truly a better alternative? Greed, incompetence, and all sorts of other negative monikers could be applied to the American financial services industry at times. The same President, politicians, and bureaucrats who have shepherded almost $16 trillion in federal debt are gearing up the immense regulatory authority under Dodd-Frank to put the screws to banks concerning fiscally responsible behavior.