Business

Obama applauds Dodd-Frank on law’s fifth anniversary

by Ben Kamisar - 07/25/15 6:00 AM ET

President Obama celebrated the five-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law Saturday, praising it for helping America battle back from the 2008 recession.

“In America, we should reward drive, innovation, and fair play. That’s what Wall Street reform does. It makes sure everybody plays by the same set of rules,” he said in his weekly address.

{mosads}“If we keep moving forward, not backward — if we keep building an economy that rewards responsibility instead of recklessness — then we won’t just keep coming back, we’ll come back stronger than ever,” he added.

He applauded the law for helping to end “the days of taxpayer-funded bailouts” and protecting the “economy from the kind of irresponsibility that threatened us all.”

“Wall Street Reform now allows us to crack down on some of the worst types of recklessness that brought our economy to its knees, from big banks making huge, risky bets using borrowed money, to paying executives in a way that rewarded irresponsible behavior,” he said, adding that the bill created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect consumers.

He noted that the CFPB has put “nearly $11 billion back in the pockets of more than 26 million consumers who’ve been cheated.”

Democrats used the law’s fifth anniversary to praise the bill while Republicans have panned it as ineffective.

The Republican-led Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill Thursday that would overhaul the law and allow some banks to be exempt from certain regulations.

Tags Dodd-Frank law