Nearly three years after Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial law to limit risky activities on Wall Street, a series of bills could weaken regulation of derivatives, the Washington Post reported today. The House Financial Services Committee yesterday passed six bills that limit reforms in the complex market of derivatives, including adding more flexibility for financial services companies that deal in them. A bipartisan group of lawmakers hailed the measures as necessary repairs to statutes that could hinder U.S. firms in doing business. But the Obama administration has warned that the package of bills weakens critical reforms. A similar set of bills cleared the House last year but died in the Senate. The new legislation is likely to face a similar fate, but opponents have grown concerned that individual measures could be tucked into broader pieces of legislation that would be difficult to defeat. One hotly contested bill introduced this year would allow banks to keep certain types of derivatives trades in-house, rather than spin them off into separate uninsured subsidiaries as called for under the Dodd-Frank law.
