This morning, the radio airwaves here in Washington, DC, featured a new ad from lobbying behemoth the US Chamber of Commerce attacking Sen. Chris Dodd’s new financial reform bill, unveiled yesterday afternoon. The bill, the ad says, would add burdensome bureaucracy to financial regulation, and that we’d all be better off with a revamp of the system in place then creating new entities like a council of regulators and a consumer protection agency. The ad essentially echoes the Chamber’s public position on the Dodd bill—which is outright opposition. “This bill takes three steps backwards with the hope of making future progress,” said David Hirschmann, president and CEO of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitivenes.
That the Chamber opposes Dodd’s bill is far from surprising. The organization, which has spent as much as $300,000 a day lobbying, fervently opposes many of the key reforms in the Dodd bill—it even started an entire website, StoptheCFPA.com, to fight plans to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, an independent organization whose purpose would be to protect consumers against predatory lenders, unscrupulous credit and debit card practices, exorbitant rates charged by payday lenders, and more. The Chamber, however, has claimed that the CFPA would kill jobs and place undue burden on small business owners.
Today, the Chamber is holding a press conference on the Dodd bill at its Washington offices. We’ll be there, so check back for more later this afternoon.