Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, envisions an all-power bank regulator, a new independent agency to monitor systemic risk - one that would take power away from the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, and eliminate the need for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision. And that regulator would be called ... Finra, or the Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration.
The new regulatory agency, Finra - not to be confused with FINRA, or Financial Industry Regulatory Authority - would "eliminate the alphabet soup of multiple bank regulators that has led to weak, confusing regulation where it's easy for problems to fall through the cracks and difficult to know who is responsible," according to a summary of the draft bill.
C-I Note: Yes, the proposal would eliminate the alphabet soup to just 5 simple letters, and may even start the trend of naming financial regulators as "Finra," and assigning each a different Roman numeral - i.e., Finra-I, Finra-II, and so forth.