Unnecessary

The Treasury Department wants to keep Dodd-Frank’s “orderly liquidation” power, albeit with “tweaks.”  The authority was designed so the Federal government could take those financial institutions the government itself decided were “systemically important” and shut them down if the same government, in sequence with that SI claim, decided the business was not performing up to government-dictated standards.

That’s a lot of “decides” in government hands.  It also deliberately bypasses existing bankruptcy law that has done a fine job with business failures generally and would do a fine job with financial institutions in particular, were government not putting itself in the way.

To be sure, Treasury claims to want

…changes to the bankruptcy code to make it easier for such a failure to be resolved in bankruptcy court….

To my cynical mind, though, that just sounds like a distraction in order to slide by the continuation of Government control over decisions concerning whether a business is sound enough to operate and if not, Government control over the terms of the business’ demise.

No.

Dodd-Frank needs to be rescinded in toto, including both “systemically important” determinations and control over bankruptcy procedures.

It may be that existing bankruptcy law needs improvement, but that’s a separate question, and it should not be mixed in with Dodd-Frank legitimacy questions.

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