Financial Industry Lobbyists Push Hard for Exemptions to New Regulatory Reform Law

While Wall Street lobbyists were not able to head off enactment of a sweeping financial regulatory reform bill last summer, they have not given up the fight, focusing their energies instead on meetings with the agencies that will do the regulating in hopes of getting exemptions from some of the measure's key provisions, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Times says that its analysis of meeting logs of the government agencies show that lobbyists for banks, hedge funds and other firms have held at least 510 meetings with regulators since July, when the measure was signed into law. The targeted agencies include the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Commodities Futures Exchange Commission.

Some of the regulators have chafed at the profusion of meetings requested by lobbyists. The Times said that on Sept. 28 alone, 18 separate such meetings took place.

While major laws like the financial regulatory overhaul spell out the changes and new mandates that are to take effect, many of the details relating to interpretation and enforcement are left to the agencies that must carry them out.

Lobbyists have been seeking exceptions from key provisions of the new law such as those that target the riskier, more complicated vehicles used in Wall Street trades that became controversial during the meltdown of 2008, and measures to protect consumers from excessive bank fees.

There are some groups representing consumer interests to the regulators, but the Times said more than 90 percent of the organizations listed in the meeting logs are from Wall Street and the financial industry.

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the flow of political money and lobbying, told the Times: "As you get into the nitty-gritty details [with the federal agencies] there aren't a lot of people who can give a countervailing argument."