“A wide variety of people, ranging from Senators Elizabeth Warren and David Vitter to Representative Maxine Waters and FDIC’s Thomas Hoenig, are trying to stop a last-minute attempt to remove an important piece of financial reform. They are all speaking up against a move to repeal the Lincoln Amendment using language written by Citigroup in the year-end budget process.

“Given the wide variety of people against it, it’s interesting how few people are for it. One of the few institutions that has defended it is the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), whose Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative released a statement saying:

“The Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act is consistent with BPC’s recommendations to repeal the Lincoln Amendment and to substantially increase funding for the SEC and CFTC.”

“These recommendations they cite date back to a 2013 paper, “Better Path Forward on the Volcker Rule and the Lincoln Amendment,” that included arguments against pushing out swaps.

“What’s their case, and does it hold up under scrutiny? We argue it does not. It misreads the purpose and scope of the Volcker Rule, disregards their own analysis on how financial reform should proceed, misses recent developments in the derivatives market, and ignores the issue of what an implicit government support means for exotic derivatives.

“As a reminder, the Lincoln Amendment pushing out swaps (which we’ll refer to as 716) insists that the largest banks hold their exotic, customized, and non-cleared derivatives outside of their FDIC-insured entities in separately capitalized subsidiaries. 716 exempted most standardized derivatives, including interest rate and foreign exchange swaps, as well as cleared credit default swaps (CDS). This provision only applies to the odd and dangerous stuff.”

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Read the full Next New Deal (The Blog of the Roosevelt Institute) article by Mike Konczal, Alexis Goldstein, and Caitlin Kline here.