Wallison charged Dodd-Frank caused a big decline in small banks, which hurt small businesses that relied on them for loans.
Responding to that claim in a tweet, Ed Mierzwinski, program director at U.S. PIRG, said Wallison is ignoring the role more than 30 years of bank consolidation has played in the decline of small banks.
Norbert Michel, financial regulations fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said Dodd-Frank has needlessly increased borrowing costs.
While the bill calls for restrictions on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Michel said Congress should go further and put its authority in the Federal Trade Commission.
Hester Peirce, a senior research fellow at the Koch family-funded Mercatus Center, said the CHOICE Act takes a healthy step by allowing more investors to qualify as accredited, giving them access to a broader array of investments.
“Because many investors prefer to invest through pools, the relief afforded to pooled investment vehicles and their advisors by the CHOICE Act could also be instrumental in expanding small businesses’ access to capital,” said Peirce, whose nomination by President Obama as a Republican commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2015 failed to gain a full Senate vote.
In addition to the conservative critics of Dodd-Frank, the committee also heard from one of the people involved in the law's creation. Michael Barr, a University of Michigan law professor and former assistant U.S. treasurer who was one of the architects of Dodd-Frank, told the committee that it's a safe bet that no revisions to Dodd-Frank will be passed by Congress this year.
One of the changes Barr said he would like for Dodd-Frank is a simplification of the “know your customer” rules for investment advisors, broker dealers and banks. The rules create too much paperwork and don’t help catch bad guys, he said.