Financial Regulation Bill Passes

Friday, 16 July 2010 | by Pat's Picks

The financial regulation bill passed the Senate yesterday, by a vote of 60 to 39. The New York Times says after years of watching Wall Street with “wide-eyed admiration,” politicians in Washington demonstrated a new mistrust in the country’s financial system. The bill creates a wider net of federal regulation but the Times says because many of those details are being left to regulators to work out, there is likely to be years of back and forth. The leaders of Wall Street responded by saying they expected to pass on many of their new costs to the consumer. The Times quotes Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase: ?If you?re a restaurant and you can?t charge for the soda, you?re going to charge more for the burger.”

The Wall Street Journal says the bill will change the way everything in the way the financial sector works, “from debit cards to the ability to invest in hedge funds.” Democrats say the changes will reduce the chance of another financial crisis - as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put it: “These reforms will benefit the prudent and constrain the imprudent.”