Bloomberg TV: The Future of Financial Regulation
Washington, D.C., Of Counsel Michael Oxley, former Congressman, Chairman of the House Financial Services committee and co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, appeared Bloomberg News on September 14, 2009, discussing the future of financial regulation.
Asked to comment on President Obama's remarks regarding "commons sense rules" for Wall Street, Oxley said, "I think the President's on the right track. Clearly the status quo cannot maintain. After all, essentially, we have an early 20th century model for regulation in a 21st century that now has . . . trading on the internet and is international in scope. So clearly, we have to make some rules changes, some regulatory changes and some legislative changes. Otherwise we risk, as the president said, finding ourselves in the same mess we had last year. I'm pretty confident something is going to happen."
Asked his thoughts on the prospect of a systemic risk regulator, or some type of overseer of the markets, Oxley said, "I don't like to call them a 'regulator,' [but] I do think we need an overseer at 30,000 feet to take a look at what's going on in the market . . . There's a lot of discussion on whether it should be the Fed. I happen to think that this idea of a council of regulators makes more sense than the Fed."