All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.
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During an other-wise deathly boring year spent covering this debate, I learned to derive some entertainment from watching politicians scramble to give floor speeches about financial reform without disclosing the fact that they didn't have the first fucking clue what a credit-default swap is, or how a derivative works. This was certainly true of Democrats, but the Republicans were way, way better at it. Their strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: Don't even bother trying to figure out the math-y stuff, and instead just blame the entire crisis on government efforts to make homeowners of lazy black people. "Private enterprise mixed with social engineering" was how Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama put it, with a straight face, not long before the bill passed.
The argument favored by Wall Street lobbyists and Obama's team of triangulating pro-business Democrats was more subtle. In this strangely metaphysical version of recent history, the economy was ruined by bad luck and a few bad actors, not by any particular law or policy. It was the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument expanded to cover global financial fraud. "There is an assumption that math is evil," insisted Keith Hennessey, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, at a hearing in June. "Credit-default swaps are things, and things can't be culprits."
Both of these takes were engineered to avoid an uncomfortable political truth: The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions and other suckers, then multiply their score by leveraging their phony-baloney deals over and over. It was pure financial alchemy – turning manure into gold, then spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into vast profits using complex, mostly unregulated new instruments that almost no one outside of a few experts in the field really understood. With the government borrowing mountains of Chinese and Saudi cash to fight two crazy wars, and the domestic manufacturing base mostly vanished overseas, this massive fraud for all intents and purposes was the American economy in the 2000s; we were a nation subsisting on an elaborate check-bouncing scheme.
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It started with Senate rookie Scott Brown, who demanded major changes to Merkley-Levin on behalf of big Massachusetts banks in exchange for his vote. But Senate sources I talked to insist that Chris Dodd, the powerful chair of the Senate Banking Committee, was just using Brown as a cover to gut the Volcker rule. "It became far more than accommodating the Massachusetts banks," says one high-ranking Senate aide. "It became a ruse for Treasury trying to get as far as they could, with Dodd's help."
From the start, Dodd had been opposed to the ban on proprietary trading. "Hey, I would gladly dump the Volcker rule," he reportedly told industry lobbyists. "But I can't, because of the pressure I'm getting from the left." Now, with Brown pressing for concessions, Dodd agreed to let Merkley-Levin be spattered with a wave of loopholes. If you can imagine a 4,000-pound lizard pretending to cower before a Cub Scout clutching a lollipop, then you've grasped the basic dynamic of a grizzled legislative titan like Dodd caving into Brown, the cheery GOP newbie with the Pez-dispenser face.
First, in what amounted to an open handout to the financial interests represented by Brown, insurers, mutual funds and trusts were exempted from the Merkley-Levin ban. Then, with the floodgates officially open, every financial company in America was granted a massive loophole – one that allowed them to skirt the ban on risky gambling by investing a designated percentage of their holdings in hedge funds and private-equity companies.
The common justification for this loophole, known as the de minimis exemption, was that banks need it to retain their "traditional businesses" and remain competitive against hedge funds. In other words, Congress must allow banks to act like hedge funds because otherwise they'd be unable to compete with hedge funds in the hedge-fund business. With the introduction of the de minimis exemption, Merkley-Levin went from being an absolute ban on federally insured banks engaging in high-risk speculation to a feeble, half-assed restriction that will be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.
The driving force behind the exemption was not Scott Brown, but the Obama administration itself. By all accounts, Geithner lobbied hard on the issue. "Treasury's official position went from opposed to supportive," one aide told reporters. "They may have even overshot Brown's desires by a bit." Throughout the negotiations over the bill, in fact, Geithner acted almost like a liaison to the financial industry, pushing for Wall Street-friendly changes on everything from bailouts (his initial proposal allowed the White House to unilaterally fork over taxpayer money to banks in unlimited amounts) to high-risk investments (he fought to let megabanks hold on to their derivatives desks).
Geithner went all out for the de minimis exemption; one Senate aide was told flatly by "those who are in charge of counting noses" that the proposal was not subject to negotiation. This was the horse-head-in-the-bed moment of the Dodd-Frank bill – the offer that couldn't be refused. "We were told that there needed to be de minimis or there would be no bill," the aide says.
But that was before the senator from Wall Street showed up. In the final hours of negotiations, a congressional delegation from New York, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, decided to take one last run at gutting the Volcker rule. It was as though someone had sent the scrubs off the court and called in the varsity. Schumer, a platitudinous champion of liberal social issues, moonlights as a pillbox-hat bellhop to Wall Street on economic matters. The self-aggrandizing New Yorker has not only fought to keep taxes low on hedge-fund billionaires, he got up onstage with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at a Democratic fundraiser in 2006 and performed "nostalgic furniture-store jingles."
This bears repeating: The person in whose hands America had placed its hopes for finance reform was someone who once sang furniture jingles onstage with Lloyd Blankfein.
Now, as the bill headed into final negotiations, the Schumer coalition suddenly decided that the de minimis exemption for banks simply wasn't big enough. In a neat trick, Schumer's crew agreed to keep the exemption at three percent – but they raised the limit dramatically by making it three percent of something else. Instead of being pegged to a bank's "tangible equity," the exemption would now be calculated based on a financial firm's "Tier 1" capital – a far bigger pool of money that includes a bank's common shares and deferred-tax assets instead of just preferred shares. In real terms, banks could now put up to 40 percent more into high-risk investments. "It was almost double what Geithner was talking about the night before," says Merkley. "For Bank of America alone, it comes to $6 billion."
Schumer himself entered the change in the Senate version of the bill – and then asked the House to sign off on it 15 minutes later. Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who had worked hard on the Volcker rule, tried to get a vote to block the change. But Barney Frank laid into him. "You had plenty of time with this," Frank barked. "You knew what was coming – siddown."
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The effort began with an extraordinary scene on the floor of the Senate – one that testifies to the nearly unanimous respect that senators hold for the human loophole machine known as Chris Dodd. In late May, the week the Senate voted on its version of the bill, Dodd came up with a hastily composed, five-page substitute to the Lincoln rule that would create a "financial stability" council with the power to unilaterally kill the rule. Faced with opposition from members of his own party, Dodd agreed to withdraw his substitute two days before the Senate vote – but given his track record of legislative maneuvering on behalf of big banks, his fellow Democrats weren't about to take him at his word. A group of senators from Dodd's own party – including Maria Cantwell of Washington – arranged to stay on the Senate floor in shifts, ensuring that there would be someone there to object in case Dodd tried to push his substitute through during one of those quiet, empty-hall, C-SPAN moments when no one was looking.
The fact that a group of Democrats had to come up with a scheme to prevent one of their own leaders from dropping a roofie in their legislative drinks pretty much sums up the state of affairs in Congress. "Yeah, that's the way it went down," says a Senate aide familiar with the Dodd Watch maneuver.
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But the ink was barely dry on the Senate bill before a full-blown mobilization against the Lincoln rule was under way. Just days after the Senate vote, Barney Frank came out and voiced opposition to the rule, saying it "goes too far." He trotted out Wall Street's lame, catchall justification for unfettered speculation: Banks need derivatives to balance their portfolios and "hedge their own risk." Not long after, a group of 43 conservative House Democrats calling themselves the "New Democrat Coalition" refused to support the reform bill unless the toughest part of the Lincoln rule – section 716 – was gutted. "They were threatening to vote against the legislation unless accommodations were made for the banks, and the biggest accommodation was watering down 716," says Michael Greenberger, a Clinton-era financial regulator involved in the talks.
It seemed like every Democrat who mattered was against 716: Dodd, Frank, the New Democrats, the Treasury department, the influential FDIC chief Sheila Bair, even Paul Volcker. Schumer and other New Yorkers lobbied mightily against it, arguing that it would be a drain on the income of Wall Street banks; New York mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Washington specifically to lobby against the Lincoln rule. But the crowd had turned against Wall Street, and the populist scrubs seemed like they were about to win big.
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Rumors circulated in Washington that Democratic leaders were cynically holding off on gutting Lincoln's proposal until she got past Halter in the primary.
If that was the plan, it worked. In early June, only a week after she defeated Halter in the runoff, Lincoln set about gutting her own rule. First she offered a broad exemption for community banks. Then a group of conservative House Democrats led by Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota proposed an even bigger compromise – one that would exempt virtually every type of derivative from federal oversight. "I was told that Peterson offered this compromise and Lincoln quickly accepted it," says Greenberger.
That was the beginning of the end. The new deal allowed banks to keep their derivatives desks by moving them into subsidiary units and exempted whole classes of derivatives from regulation: interest-rate swaps (the culprits in disasters like Greece and Orange County), foreign-exchange swaps (which helped trigger a global crash after Long Term Capital Management imploded in 1998), cleared credit-default swaps (a big contributor to the AIG collapse) and currency swaps (also involved in the Greece mess). "About 90 percent of the derivatives market was exempted," says Greenberger.
In the end, this would be the entire list of derivatives that are subject to the new law: credit-default swaps that have not been cleared by regulators and swaps involving commodities other than silver and gold.
Hilariously, even the few new regulations on derivatives that remained in the bill don't seem to worry Wall Street. Just a few weeks after Lincoln agreed to gut the measure, famed JP Morgan executive Blythe Masters, often credited as one of the inventors of the credit-default swap – one insider calls her "the Darth Vader of the swaps market" – actually sounded psyched about the bill. The new law, she declared publicly, won't even hurt energy commodities, one of the few classes of derivatives that Lincoln didn't exempt.
"It's not a big change for commodities," Masters said. "It's fine-tuning more than a material impact." The so-called reforms, she concluded, "are actually going to be very beneficial for the industry."
