To our Government officials who are suppose to watch over us and not their pockets.. we salute you ..
WASHINGTON — Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens
financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.
One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of
the Treasury Department — was essentially
Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.
In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington,
Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the
House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by
Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied
nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)
The lobbying campaign shows how, three years after Congress passed
the most comprehensive overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall
Street is finding Washington a friendlier place.
The cordial relations now include a growing number of Democrats in
both the House and the Senate, whose support the banks need if they want
to roll back parts of the 2010 financial overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank.
This legislative push is a second front, with Wall Street’s other
battle being waged against regulators who are drafting detailed rules
allowing them to enforce the law.
And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has
doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The
lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street
received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions
compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of
campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.
In recent weeks, Wall Street groups also
held fund-raisers for lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one
dinner Wednesday night,
corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a
private room of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with
Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor
of the bill championed by Citigroup.
Industry officials acknowledged that they played a role in drafting
the legislation, but argued that the practice was common in Washington.
Some of the changes, they say, have gained wide support, including from
Ben S. Bernanke, the
Federal Reserve chairman. The changes, they added, were in an effort to reach a compromise over the bills, not to undermine Dodd-Frank.
“We will provide input if we see a bill and it is something we have
interest in,” said Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., a former lawmaker turned Wall
Street lobbyist, who now serves as president of the Securities Industry
and Financial Markets Association, or Sifma.
The close ties hardly surprise Wall Street critics, who have long
warned that the banks — whose small armies of lobbyists include dozens
of former Capitol Hill aides — possess outsize influence in Washington.
“The huge machinery of Wall Street information and analysis skews the
thinking of Congress,” said Jeff Connaughton, who has been both a
lobbyist and Congressional staff member.
Lawmakers who supported the industry-backed bills said they did so
because the effort was in the public interest. Yet some agreed that the
relationship with corporate groups was at times uncomfortable.
“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands
immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative
Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the
recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort
in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former
banker at
Goldman Sachs,
he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s
appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility
of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we
live in.”
The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which took aim at culprits of the
financial crisis like lax mortgage lending and the $700 trillion
derivatives market, ushered in a new phase of Wall Street lobbying. Over
the last three years, bank lobbyists have blitzed the regulatory
agencies writing rules under Dodd-Frank, chipping away at some
regulations.
But the industry lobbyists also realized that Congress can play a critical role in the campaign to mute Dodd-Frank.
The House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not
only is it controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but
freshmen lawmakers are often appointed to the unusually large committee
because it is seen as a helpful base from which they can raise campaign
funds.
For Wall Street, the committee is a place to push back against
Dodd-Frank. When banks and other corporations, for example, feared that
regulators would demand new scrutiny of derivatives trades, they
appealed to the committee. At the time, regulators were completing
Dodd-Frank’s overhaul of derivatives, contracts that allow companies to
either speculate in the markets or protect against risk. Derivatives had
pushed the insurance giant
American International Group
to the brink of collapse in 2008. The question was whether regulators
would exempt certain in-house derivatives trades between affiliates of
big banks.
As the House committee was
drafting a bill that
would force regulators to exempt many such trades, corporate lawyers
like Michael Bopp weighed in with their suggested changes, according to
e-mails reviewed by The Times. At one point, when a House aide sent a
potential compromise to Mr. Bopp, he replied with additional tweaks.
In an interview, Mr. Bopp explained that he drafted the proposal at
the request of Congressional aides, who expressed broad support for the
change. The proposal, he explained, was a “compromise” that was actually
designed to “limit the scope” of the exemption.
“Everyone on the Hill wanted this bill, but they wanted to make sure
it wasn’t subject to abuse,” said Mr. Bopp, a partner at the law firm
Gibson, Dunn who was representing a coalition of nonfinancial
corporations that use derivatives to hedge their risk.
Ultimately, the committee inserted every word of Mr. Bopp’s
suggestion into a 2012 version of the bill that passed the House, save
for a slight change in phrasing.
A later iteration of the bill, passed by the House committee earlier this month, also included some of the same wording.
And when federal regulators
in April
released a rule governing such trades, it was significantly less
demanding than the industry had feared, a decision that the industry
partly attributed to pressure stemming from Capitol Hill.
Citigroup and other major banks used a similar approach on another
derivatives bill. Under Dodd-Frank, banks must push some derivatives
trading into separate units that are not backed by the government’s
insurance fund. The goal was to isolate this risky trading.
The provision exempted many derivatives from the requirement, but
some Republicans proposed striking the so-called push out provision
altogether. After objections were raised about the Republican plan,
Citigroup lobbyists sent around the bank’s own compromise proposal that
simply exempted a wider array of derivatives. That recommendation, put
forth in late 2011, was largely part of the bill approved by the House
committee on May 7 and is now pending before both the Senate and the
House.
Citigroup executives said the change they advocated was good for the financial system, not just the bank.
“This view is shared not just by the industry but from leaders such
as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke,” said Molly Millerwise
Meiners, a Citigroup spokeswoman.
Industry executives said that the changes — which were drafted in
consultation with other major industry banks — will make the financial
system more secure, as the derivatives trading that takes place inside
the bank is subject to much greater scrutiny.
Representative
Maxine Waters,
the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, was among the
few Democrats opposing the change, echoing the concerns of consumer
groups.
“The bill restores the public subsidy to exotic Wall Street
activities,” said Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for
Financial Reform, a nonprofit group.
But
most of the Democrats
on the committee, along with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s
defense, including the seven freshmen Democrats — most of whom have
started to receive donations this year from political action committees
of Goldman Sachs,
Wells Fargo and other financial institutions, records show.
Six days after the vote, several freshmen Democrats were
in New York
to meet with bank executives, a tour organized by Representative Joe
Crowley, who helps lead the House Democrats’ fund-raising committee. The
trip was planned before the votes, and was not a fund-raiser, but it
gave the lawmakers a chance to meet with Wall Street’s elite.
In addition to a tour of Goldman’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, and a meeting with
Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, the lawmakers went to
JPMorgan’s Park Avenue office. There, they chatted with
Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief, about Dodd-Frank and immigration reform.
The bank chief also delivered something of a pep talk.
“America has the widest, deepest and most transparent capital markets
in the world,” he said. “Washington has been dealt a good hand.”
Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Ben Protess from New York.
