Wall Street’s Unregulated Recklessness Is the Biggest Threat to Job Creators,

Not Financial Rules that Protect the American People

 

Better Markets President and CEO Dennis Kelleher made the following statement about the House Financial Services Committee’s hearing on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, entitled “The Impact of the Volcker Rule on Job Creators”:

 

“Wall Street’s gambling and recklessness caused the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the worst economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It killed economic growth, tens of millions of jobs and innumerable small businesses in this country. If it is not fully regulated, Wall Street will do that again. That is the biggest threat to jobs and job creators. This hearing should focus on those facts rather than yet more misleading claims by Wall Street’s allies about fabricated concerns about financial reform and the Volcker Rule,” said Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of Better Markets, Inc., an independent nonprofit organization that promotes the public interest in the financial markets.

 

“To be clear, the Volcker Rule doesn’t affect job creators, except to protect them – and everyone else – from the worst excesses of Wall Street. The too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street are not job creators; they are job destroyers of historic proportions. Their reckless gambling crashed the financial system, required massive taxpayer bailouts and spread economic wreckage across our country and the globe. That’s what the Volcker Rule, and other important reforms enacted as part of the historic financial reform law, are designed to prevent. Congress has an important oversight role in making sure regulators do their job, but Wall Street and its Congressional allies need to back off and let financial regulators implement the rule to protect the American people from Wall Street,” Mr. Kelleher said.

 

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Better Markets is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes the public interest in financial reform in the domestic and global capital and commodity markets. Better Markets advocates for transparency, oversight, and accountability with the goal of a stronger, safer financial system that is less prone to crisis and failure, thereby eliminating or minimizing the need for more taxpayer funded bailouts.