Barney Frank admits ‘mistake’ in Dodd-Frank

Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said on Sunday that his namesake banking regulation bill Dodd-Frank should have been more lenient towards smaller banks.
In a radio interview with John Catsimatidis, Frank said that the asset threshold for “extra supervision” of banks should have been set higher.
“We put in there that banks got the extra supervision if they were $50 billion in assets,” he said. “That was a mistake. We should have made it much higher, $125 billion or more, and we should have indexed it.”
But Frank maintained that the bill had helped eliminate some of the more risky behavior involving larger banks and included provisions that went to great lengths to help consumers.
“On the other hand I don’t want to … weaken what we call the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” he said, citing the agency’s actions against Wells Fargo over bank’s widespread creation of fraudulent accounts.
“I think the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protected people against credit card abuses, it saved the average consumer a lot of money — I don’t understand what people think is the problem there,” he said.
Frank also said it would be interesting to see how Congress reacts towards President-elect Donald Trump’s spending plans, which he says may increase the deficit.
“So I’m gonna be watching to see whether the two sides switch positions on the deficit, and whether the Republicans become much less worried about it now that it’s Donald Trump’s deficit, and the Democrats become much more critical now that it’s not Barack Obama’s.”
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