Quietly, and without garnering any real attention, either from the mainstream media or from blogs, the House and the Senate have passed a bill that is now headed to the President for his signature, establishing a bipartisan national federal commission (the Financial Markets Commission) with subpoena power to conduct a very wide-ranging investigation into the multifarious causes of the current economic crisis.
Specifically, the commission is charged with the following:
(1) to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States, specifically the role of–
(A) fraud and abuse in the financial sector, including fraud and abuse towards consumers in the mortgage sector;
(B) Federal and State financial regulators, including the extent to which they enforced, or failed to enforce statutory, regulatory, or supervisory requirements;
(C) the global imbalance of savings, international capital flows, and fiscal imbalances of various governments;
(D) monetary policy and the availability and terms of credit;
(E) accounting practices, including, mark-to-market and fair value rules, and treatment of off-balance sheet vehicles;
(F) tax treatment of financial products and investments;
(G) capital requirements and regulations on leverage and liquidity, including the capital structures of regulated and non-regulated financial entities;
(H) credit rating agencies in the financial system, including, reliance on credit ratings by financial institutions and Federal financial regulators, the use of credit ratings in financial regulation, and the use of credit ratings in the securitization markets;
(I) lending practices and securitization, including the originate-to-distribute model for extending credit and transferring risk;
(J) affiliations between insured depository institutions and securities, insurance, and other types of nonbanking companies;
(K) the concept that certain institutions are ‘too-big-to-fail’ and its impact on market expectations;
(L) corporate governance, including the impact of company conversions from partnerships to corporations;
(M) compensation structures;
(N) changes in compensation for employees of financial companies, as compared to compensation for others with similar skill sets in the labor market;
(O) the legal and regulatory structure of the United States housing market;
(P) derivatives and unregulated financial products and practices, including credit default swaps;
(Q) short-selling;
(R) financial institution reliance on numerical models, including risk models and credit ratings;
(S) the legal and regulatory structure governing financial institutions, including the extent to which the structure creates the opportunity for financial institutions to engage in regulatory arbitrage;
(T) the legal and regulatory structure governing investor and mortgagor protection;
(U) financial institutions and government-sponsored enterprises; and
(V) the quality of due diligence undertaken by financial institutions;
(2) to examine the causes of the collapse of each major financial institution that failed (including institutions that were acquired to prevent their failure) or was likely to have failed if not for the receipt of exceptional Government assistance from the Secretary of the Treasury during the period beginning in August 2007 through April 2009;
(3) to submit a report under subsection (h);
(4) to refer to the Attorney General of the United States and any appropriate State attorney general any person that the Commission finds may have violated the laws of the United States in relation to such crisis;
I received this document privately from an anonymous source. The language is almost identical to the Senate version of the bill, which was published on May 5 by Donny Shaw at OpenCongress.
Those terms of reference don’t pull any punches, do they? If they appoint competent people to the Commission, and let them conduct their investigations without interference, the results should prove to be very interesting indeed.
The ten-member panel will include six Democrats and four Republicans (or more accurately, six members to be picked by Democrats and four to be picked by Republicans). The Commission’s report is due on December 15, 2010.
The Senate amendment to create the Commission, by the way, cosponsored by Sens. Kent Conrad (D) of North Dakota and Johnny Isakson (R) of Georgia, passed with only four dissenting votes. I can only assume that most of the Republican senators who voted “Aye” didn’t have a clue what they were really assenting to.