According to Reuters and the Insurance Journal Magazine, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Thursday that opponents of financial-sector reform were trying to sabotage efforts to strengthen the system against crisis.
“With millions of Americans still struggling to find work…and even in the face of the European crisis, we are seeing a determined effort to slow and weaken reforms that are critical to our ability to protect Americans from another crisis,” Geithner told a conference to mark the setting up of the Office of Financial Research.
He said “forces working against reform” were blocking appointments to oversight positions, cutting funding, proposing new legislation to repeal parts of the Dodd-Frank law and trying to slow regulation “in the hopes of watering it down.”
The Treasure Secretary fell short of specifically naming reform opponents, but all fingers point to Republican lawmakers that have opposed reform attempts since the 2007-2009 collapse.
Geithner said the financial system was “in much stronger shape than before the crisis” but said that, if opponents of reform are successful they could still create conditions in which the economy would be vulnerable to crises.