TPA Releases Financial Services Report

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Kara Zupkus (224)-456-0257

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) released “Too Safe to Succeed: How Financial Regulation Undermines Prosperity,” an eye-opening new report taking a comprehensive view of the state of financial services regulation.

“Capital is the oxygen of modern economies,” the report states. “Without it, companies cannot be created, business cannot be done, transactions cannot be completed, ideas cannot be manifested, and inventions cannot be brought to fruition.”

The report’s release comes as Americans are feeling the pinch of tighter credit, rising costs, and uncertainty in financial markets, showing how financial regulations affect both consumers and businesses. From Dodd-Frank to cryptocurrency regulation and price controls to jawboning and more, TPA examines how financial regulations prevent the flow of capital and stifle growth and prosperity.

TPA Research Director David B. McGarry offered the following comment:

“Financial institutions are the beating heart of the American economy. Dispersing life-giving capital to all manner of business enterprises is an essential function. Unfortunately for businesses and consumers, the financial services industry is one of America’s most heavily regulated, bound by the dictates of technocrats and beholden to the risk-averse worrywarts. These would-be central planners have, over the course of decades, enacted the statutes and imposed the regulations that hamstring the industry. Financial services is no different from any other industry. It would operate far better if subjected to market forces instead of the collective will of generations of central planners.

“As the TPA report documents, decades of ill-conceived rules and informal coercion have created dysfunction. What drives other industries—supply, demand, and costs—drives this one too. Central planning fails. Price controls fail. Purposefully imposed regulatory uncertainty fails. The excision of market forces—including the pressures of risk-taking—fail. Americans would be better off if the federal government were to undertake a concerted effort to free financial institutions from regulations that block their path to success and Americans’ path to prosperity.

“The problem with which the financial services industry contends is too much regulatory interference, not too little. While TPA’s report deals primarily with the errors of existing regulation, it provides an instruction manual for the future. Regulators must unwind damaging restrictions and unshackle American financial institutions, allowing them to operate in freedom to serve American businesses and consumers.”

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Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.