By the end of 2011 regulators had missed a big chunk of their deadlines on Dodd-Frank.
The good news is that there were no new Dodd-Frank deadlines missed in December. The bad news is that at the end of 2011, 200 deadlines had come and gone and regulators have only been able to meet 51 of them. This is according to the law firm Davis Polk, which has been keeping a record of the Dodd-Frank implementation process (see the December report here) since it began in 2010.
Davis Polk said that the 200 passed deadlines also represents 70 percent of the 286 rulemaking requirements that have specified deadlines. Of the 400 total rulemaking requirements, Davis Polk reported, 86 or 21.5 percent, have been finalized and 155 (38.75 percent) have been proposed. The firm also reported that another 159 rules, or 39.75 percent, have yet to be proposed.
As for the all-important Title VII of Dodd-Frank, the derivative portion of the law, the CFTC, the SEC and other regulators have missed 67 deadlines and finalized only 26 rules in 2011. The CFTC’s slow pace and missed deadlines have not been helped by a congressionally induced budget squeeze. Earlier in 2011, the White House requested $308mn for the CFTC in its fiscal 2012 budget – a big increase from its previous $202 million budget. But congress effectively froze the agency’s budget in December, giving it just $205mn. However, in a deal struck in mid-December, the Commission reportedly will get an additional $10mn for staffing. The Washington Post reports that the $10mn will instead be “shifted out of the agency’s budget for information technology.”