Fact Sheet: The Wrong Choice Act Paves the Way Back to the Financial Crisis

WASHINGTON, D.C. - During the House Financial Services Committee markup of H.R. 10, also known as the Wrong Choice Act, Committee Democrats are fighting back against Republican attempts to make financial markets less safe and put consumers at risk. The Wrong Choice Act undermines and outright repeals critical safeguards in Dodd-Frank, the law that was designed to protect the American economy from another financial crisis.

The Wrong Choice Act:

• Completely guts and functionally terminates the highly successful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Consumer Bureau), which has already returned nearly $12 billion to 29 million consumers ripped off by predatory financial institutions.
  
  
• Shrinks financial stability safeguards, such as stress tests and living wills. In addition, these and other rules for the largest banks to operate in a safe and sound manner are completely eliminated for Wall Street banks that choose an insufficient leverage requirement that would encourage the kind of risk-taking that crashed the economy in 2008.
  
  
• Repeals the Orderly Liquidation Authority, the emergency mechanism that prevents future bailouts and allows any mega financial company to fail safely.
  
  
• Repeals the Volcker Rule, which stops banks from gambling with taxpayer money.
  
  
• Repeals the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (Council) tool to designate non-banks, like AIG, as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) for purposes of enhanced supervision and regulation. Only four non-banks have been designated, and one, GE Capital, de-risked and has already been de-designated.
  
  
• Abolishes the Office of Financial Research (OFR), which collects data and provides valuable research and analysis to help the Council identify and stop risks to our financial stability.
  
  
• Subjects all federal financial regulators to the politicized annual appropriations process for funding, enabling Wall Street special interests to weaken their overseers.
  
  
• Provides a two-year escape hatch for Trump-appointed regulators to administratively roll back regulations.
  
  
• Places America’s workers at risk by curtailing the Federal Reserve’s discretion in taking into account a wide range of dynamic economic data and subjecting monetary policy decisions to short-term political pressure.
  
  
• Bolsters the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back investment protections for seniors and retirement savers, like the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule.
  
  
• Allows Wall Street fraudsters to get away scot-free and continue their misconduct undeterred by making it harder for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to initiate enforcement actions and eliminating its authority to ban officers and directors from the industry.
  
  
  

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