-
"The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure," delivers on expectations that former BB&T chief John Allison would continue to put heavy blame on politicians for the panic of 2008 and the lingering economic malaise.
September 26 -
The law radically expands the power of the Fed and banking regulators. It gives the institutions that created the crisis more ability to cause bigger problems in the future, writes former chairman and CEO of BB&T John Allison.
September 27 -
As long as the federal government can print money at will, the politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) will accumulate debt until the United States experiences a financial collapse.
September 24 -
Rather than pushing hard for repeal, congressional Republicans are taking a small-bore approach in their opposition to the 2010 reform law.
July 29
A seminar on the Dodd-Frank Act took a testy turn when John Allison, the former chairman and chief executive of BB&T, made an ardent pitch to abolish the Federal Reserve.
"The real cause of the financial crisis was a combination of errors," primarily related to the Fed, said Allison, who earlier this year became the president and chief executive of the Cato Institute. He then pushed
Allison, who earlier this year published a book that delivered a
"We would all be worse off as a country if the Federal Reserve did not intervene when it did," said Michael Barr, a lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. The Fed's decision to aggressively intervene during the 2008 financial crisis "is actually helping to sustain a recovery," added Barr,
The Allison-Barr faceoff was intriguing because the panel, which included bankers, legal experts and a former lawmaker, was supposed to focus on Dodd-Frank. But it quickly veered off course, as panelists used their initial comments to argue the causes of the financial crisis, which zeroed in on the Fed.
"I'm not against the Federal Reserve Bank, but the panic of 1907 is not a good example, right" said former Sen. Phil Gramm, who tried to strike a diplomatic tone. The Republican lawmaker added that, "I think the Fed has learned something since then."
The panel's moderator, Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals, repeatedly cut off arguments about the Fed. At one point, Gorsuch prefaced a question about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by noting that the question was not about "the existence of the Federal Reserve."
Panelists eventually settled into a discussion about the CFPB. The bureau "struck a reasonable balance in its structure," Barr said. "I don't think it's a radical departure on the legislative landscape from the range of structures."
Gramm, however, said he found it "extraordinary" that Dodd-Frank left Congress out of the oversight of the CFPB.
It was up to Allison to steer the