Under the prior Administration, regulators simply refused to acknowledge that there were problems in the fixed income markets, perhaps because it would have meant acknowledging that there had been negative consequences to Dodd-Frank. The fact that spreads in certain securities declined, as Commissioner Stein noted, is not evidence of improved liquidity if the size of the orders as to which those spreads relate has declined substantially, or if those orders relate to a materially lesser…

The notion that the departing head of a powerful federal agency has the right to bequeath that power to a subordinate who was vetted by neither the President nor Congress seems, to pick a gentle word: daft. Mr. Cordray is not a Baron, and the CFPB is not an estate. As badly drafted as Dodd-Frank is, its supporters do not bring credit on themselves by arguing that they really intended transfers of power at the CFPB to be by primogeniture.

Given that financial activities are a global business, financial regulations can have a tremendous impact on global competition; i.e., on the ability of financial institutions based in one region to compete in another. When Dodd-Frank was adopted, Congress did not give due consideration to the potential negative effects that the statute and the implementing regulations could have on U.S. competitiveness. This was based perhaps on the mistaken assumption that other countries would follow…

Notwithstanding the efforts described to improve certain existing rates and propose new repo reference rates, the question remains: transition to what? While the regulators are quite right to point out the deficiencies of LIBOR (e.g., the absence of transaction-volume to determine a genuine rate), the path forward is still unclear as it is not obvious that the new indices, based on collateralized borrowing, can serve the purpose for which LIBOR was intended.