“Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is not in favor of repealing the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in its entirety,” Forbes reported Thursday.
“I wouldn’t want regulation to be repealed in total,” Blankfein said.
This cuts against the conventional wisdom that Obama was the scourge of Wall Street, that regulation keeps the big guys in check and that free enterprise is a big gift to Big Business. But it jibes perfectly with what Blankfein and other Wall Street giants have been saying all decade.
“We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform,” Blankfein said when the bill was on the table.
“More intense regulatory and technology requirements have raised the barriers to entry higher than at any other time in modern history,” Blankfein said in 2015. “This is an expensive business to be in, if you don’t have the market share in scale. Consider the numerous business exits that have been announced by our peers as they reassessed their competitive positioning and relative returns.”
The other big guys feel the same way. Jamie Dimon has praised Dodd-Frank for widening JP Morgan’s “moat.”
One result: More concentration in the financial sector and nearly no new banks entering the industry. Good for the incumbents. Bad for consumers and would-be competitors.
Also, remind me: Is there any systemic danger posed to the economy by having a consolidated financial sector with a few banks that are too big to fail?
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
