Connecticut’s Republican Senate nominee Linda McMahon has been all over the place when it comes to the the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which bears the name of the senator she’s hoping to replace. “Linda supports financial reform,’’ her spokesman Ed Patru has said. “She believes the goals of this particular legislation are laudable and certain aspects of it are reasonable.” However, she said that she would have ultimately vote against Dodd-Frank, because “I think that this bill grows government more than it does anything else.”
McMahon has been particularly critical of attempts to place new restrictions on the risky practices of Wall Street, telling Connecticut Plus that “we have a fair amount of regulation in place now.” And during a campaign stop at Fairfield University yesterday, McMahon said that the government actually needs to roll back bank regulations, giving them freer rein:
McMahon said the government needs to “dial back” regulations on banks because the amount of money they need to have in reserve to loan out money was high enough to prevent them from loaning to people with good credit histories. “We have to really get people working in the private sector. It’s why I think it’s very important to send more business people and fewer career politicians to Washington,” McMahon said.
Businesses large and small are having trouble accessing loans because the economy is weak and banks are holding money against a variety of losses they feel might be coming their way. Lifting regulations is not going to suddenly make them feel that economic conditions merit making loans, but it would certainly free them up to go back to making risky bets and building the junk financial products that led to the economic meltdown in the first place.
But McMahon is hardly alone amongst Republican Senate candidates in wanting to do away with restrictions on the nation’s financial industry. In fact, Washington’s Republican Senate nominee Dino Rossi has explicitly called for repealing the entire Dodd-Frank law.
In addition, Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee have made it quite clear that they intend to take a hatchet to Dodd-Frank, and at the very least bury regulators who are attempting to implement it under a barrage of paperwork and hearing appearances. In the meantime, Wall Street banks are already back to their old tricks, engaging in risky trading and searching for loopholes to exploit.