Will It Work and How Will We Know? The Future of FinReg

Mike Konczal and the Roosevelt Institute to discuss the second act of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Next Monday, October 4th, I’ll be holding a conference for the Roosevelt Institute titled “Will It Work and How Will We Know? The Future of Financial Reform Conference.”

Here at the Roosevelt Institute, we’ve fought for financial reform over the past year with events including our Make Markets Be Markets project. We’ve worked to increase the sophistication of the discussion surrounding specific issues. We’ve also pushed for the role of regulation in creating rules of the road necessary for a healthy financial system that works to build the real economy. The first round of that battle is over with the passage of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It’s time for phase two.

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Most other policy initiatives have some sort of conceptual metrics associated with them — “bending the cost curve” for health care, “jobs saved/created” for the stimulus and test scores for No Child Left Behind. Bundled with the goalposts of a metric is an idea of how the policy should work, as the metrics can’t really be separated from creating what it is going to measure. So we need to figure out what bending the cost curve of financial reform is: what are ways to know if the policy implementation is going well or poorly? How can we tell if we are closer or further away from a functioning financial market?

We are gathering some of the best minds of financial reform to discuss this. Here is the current schedule, with a panel focus on Too Big To Fail, as well as a focus on the financial markets broadly construed from derivatives to consumer lending.

It’s a small venue at capacity, but it will all be online shortly after the conference. We’ll be putting out a booklet of white papers by the authors outlining their ideas about what went wrong, how the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill is meant to remedy it and what it would look like to get to a healthy functioning market, which will also be put online. We’ll also be running excerpts and opinions by our participants here and at New Deal 2.0 To start, here is Wally Turbeville on derivatives. I hope you check it all out.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.