One of the co-authors of the Dodd-Frank Act, former Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, told CNBC Tuesday, that the law needs to have a “good hearing” and comments from experts to improve it.
“This is a complicated piece of legislation that obviously needs a good hearing, bringing in witnesses from the private sector to comment on,” said Dodd about the landmark piece of financial reform legislation that passed last year.
“This is an opportunity for us to go back and look at this bill and make sure we achieved the very results we attempted in the last Congress,” he added.
Dodd said that two areas, in particular, need to be reviewed—those on derivatives and too-big-to-fail.
“It [too-big-to-fail] needs to be addressed, in how you would unwind a highly interconnected company,” added Dodd. “I’m not sure the existing bankruptcy law is as strong as it ought to be and as nuanced as it ought to be to accommodate that.”
He said that housing finance—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac —also needs to be tackled. Reform of those agencies was not part of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The Dodd-Frank bill was signed into law by President Obama last July. The act, which was passed by Congress as a response to the financial collapse of 2008-2009, is considered the most sweeping change to financial regulation in the U.S since the Great Depression.