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The opposition to the rollback of the Wall Street reforms in Dodd-Frank is growing enough for Wall Street to be worried. That's evident in this Bloomberg story headlined "Wall Street Denied in Latest Rewrite of Senate Banking Bill," which goes to great lengths to say just how much Wall Street isn't getting in the rewrite. The lede sentence of that story reads "Wall Street banks don't have much to celebrate in what's probably the final version of a bill easing financial rules that is headed for a U.S. Senate vote."
Really! Wall Street isn't going to get anything out of it at all! They didn't have anything to do with rewriting it! Really! So when a banking lobbyist says "This is not the last chance for changes, but if this does not pass, it cements Dodd-Frank as is for the foreseeable future," he's not at all saying that this is something that Wall Street really, really wants to pass.
Wall Street's concern is that the House will reject it because it doesn't go as far as the House destruction of Dodd-Frank went. But that could be changing, since as David Dayen writes, the Senate is rewriting the bill as they go along, per usual under Mitch McConnell. The bill could be moving toward a vote as soon as Friday, and as usual: "Almost nobody has any idea what the bill will ultimately look like. And they almost certainly won’t know until hours, or perhaps minutes, before they have to make a final decision."
Here's one thing they just slipped in that Dayen highlights:
Another new provision dumped into the bill, incredibly, would benefit Equifax. Section 310 has the well-intentioned aim of creating "credit score competition" by requiring the Federal Housing Finance Agency to use alternative credit score models other than the dominant one provided by Fair Isaac Co., commonly known as the FICO score. The main beneficiary of this is FICO's biggest rival, VantageScore, which uses an alternative credit score model. It licenses data provided by the three major credit reporting agencies: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
That's just part of what House Financial Services Committee chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) is pushing in the "manager's amendment" in the Senate. He told Bloomberg "We’re up to four dozen bills that we’re expecting to be included in the final package." Those bills, Dayen points out, "could be tucked into a final manager's amendment to the Senate bill, without much advance warning, and put on the floor before senators have had a chance to read or analyze it."
There was enough in this bill for Senate Democrats to reject, before it started being messed about with. The bill they agreed to move forward on on Tuesday is not going to be the bill that they vote on Friday or next week, and it won't be because of floor debate and amendments. It will be changed by things Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) is jamming in as manager of the bill on the floor.
