Critics Slam Volcker Rule as 'Worst of All Worlds'

Financial regulators announced Tuesday that, after three and a half years of negotiations and billions spent by big banks in an attempt to carve out regulatory loopholes, Feds agreed upon a set of banking reform guidelines known as the “Volcker Rule.”

Following the announcement, financial reform advocates cautioned those who celebrated the agreed-upon rules as a “major defeat for Wall Street,” by saying that by providing flexible exemptions and self-reporting compliance, the lukewarm deal was “the worst of all worlds.”

Known to critics as “Glass-Steagall-lite,” section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (called the “Volcker Rule” after Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve), claims to establish a firewall between commercial lending and investment banks by preventing big banks from making proprietary trades for their own profit.

Following the 2010 passage of Dodd-Frank, the details of this section had to be crafted jointly by five banking regulators—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

After three and a half years, the groups announced in a joint statement Tuesday completion of the task:

However, the group notes, there are exemptions for certain activities, “including market making, underwriting, hedging, trading in government obligations, insurance company activities, and organizing and offering hedge funds or private equity funds.”

Many claim the rules’ 800+ pages and overly-flexible exemptions will provide cover for the big banks to continue business as usual.

“The ‘Volcker Rule’ represents Glass-Steagall-lite,” writes William Black, former bank regulator and associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  “It cannot work because it avoids doing what Glass-Steagall did,” he writes, by clearly separating “what was permissible from what was forbidden.”

“In an effort to limit the evasions that are made inevitable by its failure to act boldly and ban derivative derivatives, [the rule] will reportedly be over 850 pages,” Black continues. “It will be a nightmare for bank examiners and honest banks, yet the big cheating banks will easily evade it by calling their speculation ‘hedging.’”

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