Various federal regulators are making the financial-reform rule-making process -- interpreting the Dodd-Frank legislation and setting specific limits and practices -- more transparent by revealing their meetings with industry representatives. As we've discussed before, this is a good first step but really is only useful if pro-reform activists can organize around this data. The other side of this equation, though, is making sure that there are meetings with representatives of the public interest and that their input into the conversation is listened to as closely as that of industry representatives, and it's not clear to me yet that we'll see more of that in the current process than we have in the past.
Meanwhile, some folks are down on the new disclosures:
“It seems to me that it's really going overboard to provide public disclosure of all of that,” said Robert L. Clarke, who was comptroller of the currency from 1985 to 1992. “I would hope it wouldn’t have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to express their views on the regulatory process.”
There's chilling, and then there's chilling. I'm in the camp that says negotiations ought to be private, if only because effective deal-making seems to require actors to have space away from second-guessing while hashing out an agreement. But the public-comment period on rules isn't a negotiation; it's a chance to share information. There's no reason that disclosing participation in that process will prevent people from being forthright -- that is, unless their views are too self-interested to be welcome in the public sphere and can't be defended outside of a dark room in Washington. If the environment for those views becomes a little colder, well, chill out. That's a good thing.
-- Tim Fernholz
