How Wall St. got its way
But last month the Fed’s top lawyer delivered a particularly blunt critique that proved golden to the industry.
“You can tell that was written at 2:30 in the morning and so that needs to be I think revisited just to make sense of it,” Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez said at an American Bar Association conference in Washington.
All that was left was for the provision to survive the horse trading between House and Senate appropriators during final budget talks.
During these negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.\
Officials at both agencies have complained they are woefully underfunded and it is compromising their ability to carry out their Dodd-Frank responsibilities and to effectively police financial markets.
The fiscal 2015 spending package would increase the CFTC budget by $35 million to $250 million and the SEC’s budget by $150 million to $1.5 billion.