Chamber watching Dodd-Frank for emerging problems

March 29, 2011

The HIll

Peter Schroeder

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is promising to keep a close eye on the implementation of Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Officials with the business lobby said Monday they are worried that as the sweeping Wall Street reform law is put into action by various regulators, the new rules will arbitrarily benefit and harm various companies.

"The great danger is that as we move from the architecture stage ... once regulators start building the house, that will start creating winners and losers," said David Hirschmann, president and chief executive officer of the chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. "The goal should be having the best regulatory structure without picking winners and losers."

He made clear the Chamber will not hesitate to call on Congress to make legislative fixes to emerging problems in Dodd-Frank, as well as additional reforms that went unaddressed in the first pass over Wall Street.

"A lot of the existing problems were simply unaddressed by Dodd-Frank, and some new problems were created," he said.

Specifically, he said there needs to be a strong, workable exemption for so-called "end users" of swaps -- non-financial entities that use derivatives to hedge against risk to their business -- and criticized another provision that enables regulators to hear from company whistleblowers, saying it would "undermine internal compliance programs at companies."

"We might have a situation where the goal here is to maximize the reward to the whistleblower rather than to really address the underlying problem," he said.

Hirschmann's comments come two days before the chamber hosts its Capital Markets Summit, where the business group will hear from Dodd-Frank bigwigs including Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

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