The Dodd-Frank Act was a cornucopia of opportunity for rule writers. To the regulatory community, this was almost a bottomless candy jar. And so our regulatory apparatchiki began to beaver away and produced, to date, something like 22,000 pages of rules which purport to moderate or prevent bad behavior by all those nasty institutions perceived to have some responsibility for the financial crisis of 2008. Curiously, at least, to me, Dodd-Frank included in among its bad boys, those institutions “significantly engaged in insurance activities.” Apparently, our Congressional grandees in the overheated environment of the Great Recession conflated insurance and banking. Hey, they are kind of like financial institutions, and they’re big, or at least some of them are, and are probably filing with nefarious types inclined to go off the reservation and therefore in need of “guidance” from the regulatory community.
Continue Reading Dodd-Frank Rulemaking Developments by the Fed for Fed-Supervised Insurance Firms