Jobs Agenda: Capital Markets

The U.S. Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness (CCMC) works toward advancing America's global leadership in capital formation by supporting capital markets that are the most fair, efficient, and innovative in the world.

The Facts

• Whether it is borrowing from a relative, getting a line of credit at a bank, attracting venture capital, or taking a company public, businesses depend on transparent and efficient credit markets to raise the necessary cash to operate.
• The global financial crisis revealed weaknesses in our outdated, broken financial regulatory system: significant gaps, duplicative regulators with overlapping jurisdiction, inconsistent enforcement, failure to identify systemic threats, and other problems that have adversely impacted the ability of businesses to raise capital and create jobs.
• The Financial Regulatory Reform bill doesn't address the core causes of the financial crisis. Instead, it adds new regulatory agencies to the already antiquated system and grows a bloated, ineffective bureaucracy while leaving critical areas unaddressed, including the future of Freddie and Fannie.
• The real impact of the bill will depend on its implementation. The legislation requires regulators to issue at least 355 new rules and conduct 47 studies and 74 reports that could lead to additional rules.

The Chamber's Plan to Revitalize Our Capital Markets

• Establish a Modern and Coherent Financial Services Regulatory Structure
  • Actively engage as regulators implement the financial regulatory bill, work toward legislative corrections where needed, take legal action when necessary, and continue to make the case for the administration and Congress to take up unaddressed areas of reform.
• Implement a Global Corporate Financial Reporting Model
  • The FASB and IASB are in the process of releasing eight major accounting standards to advance the goal of a single global accounting standard. The CCMC is engaged with standard setters and regulators to ensure that these projects proceed in a deliberative open process and that the right standards are implemented.
• Restore Fairness to the Legal, Regulatory, and Enforcement Processes
  • Ensure tough, fair enforcement tactics and end third-party abuses of legal and regulatory processes to protect the constitutional and due process rights of individuals and companies to drive economic activity.
• Promote an Innovation Economy and Long-Term Interests of All Investors
  • Shareholder proxy resolutions are an increasingly popular tool for activist unions to leverage for organizing objectives. The CCMC opposes using this process to promote narrow interests that do not serve the long-term goals of a company or its investors.

To learn more, visit uschamber.com/ccmc.