Obama meets independent financial regulators

U.S. President Barack Obama has hosted a meeting with leading independent financial regulators during which they discussed the "significant progress" made to strengthen the financial system and protect consumers, the White House announced. The White House said in a statement that Obama and the regulators discussed "the ongoing implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act," during the meeting held late on Monday. It added that Obama "commended the regulators for their work but stressed the need to expeditiously finish implementing the critical remaining portions of Wall Street Reform to ensure we are able to prevent the type of financial harm that led to the Great Recession from ever happening again." The group also discussed "opportunities to continue interagency coordination, including through the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and the need to remain responsive to new risks in the financial system." They also discussed "the challenges posed by the current budget environment to their efforts in strengthening the financial system and protecting consumers, and the importance of providing adequate funding for independent regulatory agencies to achieve their core missions." The statement indicated that in addition to White House staff, participants included the Comptroller of the Currency, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and the chairs of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also attended the meeting. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly referred to as commonly referred to as Dodd-Frank) was signed into federal law by President Obama on July 21, 2010. Passed as a response to the late-2000s recession, it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression. It made changes in the American financial regulatory environment that affect all federal financial regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation's financial services industry.