Angry Bart Chilton takes his parting shot

By William D. Cohan
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, December 24, 2013

After almost 30 years in Washington, Bart Chilton will soon be taking his leave. For the past 6 1/2 years he has been an outspoken member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of the financial industry’s most important regulators.

Chilton leaves behind a sobering message: As we long suspected, Wall Street continues to use every trick in its playbook to do whatever it can to eviscerate numerous post-financial-crisis rules. The arsenal includes high-powered lobbyists who outnumber lawmakers 10-1; $1,000-an-hour letter-writing lawyers who gain strength from negotiating over arcana; and the occasional hoodwinking of a president whose knowledge of the ways of finance are close to nil.

In a recent interview Chilton said that, despite years of hard work by financial regulators to put the 2010 Dodd-Frank law into force (witness the 882 pages required to explain a 71-page Volcker Rule), their efforts will be futile in the face of Wall Street's money and power. "The lesson for me is: The financial sector is so powerful that they will roll things back over time," Chilton says. "The Wall Street firms have tremendous influence, and they can impact policy to a greater degree than any one regulator or a small group of regulators can." ...

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