As the Republican Party announces regulatory alternatives to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was devised to reform Wall Street, protect consumers, and prevent financial collapse, Marketplace interviews some of the key architects of Dodd-Frank for an episode on “what it set out to do, and where we are now.”
Among those experts is Michael Barr, former assistant secretary for financial institutions at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Overall, Barr says, Dodd-Frank reforms are “helping to make the system safer and fairer” and are shielding the U.S. from some of the economic troubles experienced by other countries.
“If you compare, for example, how the U.S. is doing as compared to Europe, the U.S. is doing much, much better than the Europeans, in part because we focused very early on, on recapitalizing our financial system and developing new rules of the road,” Barr says.
Michael S. Barr is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, a professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Brookings Institution.