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54% of Americans want to dump Dodd-Frank

Thursday 21 October 2010 - by Will Henley

A majority of the US public want to ditch the Obama administration’s flagship piece of financial legislation, just three months after it was signed into law.

According to a survey by two leading universities, 54 per cent of Americans refuse to back the Dodd-Frank Act, which is designed to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. Confidence in the financial system as a whole has plummeted to just 25 per cent, it reveals.

One of the academics behind the poll, Paola Sapienza, professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, claimed that it shows that support is continuing to "decline" in spite of action by Congress.

“A primary consequence of the 2008 financial crisis was a large drop in trust Americans had in financial institutions, and we’re seeing a continued decline despite reform enacted to combat this sentiment," Sapienza said.

“Interestingly, Americans who declared themselves satisfied with the Dodd-Frank Bill trust banks eight percent more, but unfortunately only a minority is happy with the legislation.”


Conducted quarterly by the Kellogg School of Management and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the poll reveals that only 12 percent of the public are satisfied with the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, one of the most radical pieces of legislation since the Great Depression.

Two-thirds say they believe that it will be insufficient to ensure against future bank bailouts.

The survey reveals high levels of public dissatisfaction with one of the key new agencies to emerge from the legislation, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Only 34 percent believe that the regulator is a “useful agency to protect consumers”, with a quarter concluding that it is “overreaching of government power” (25 per cent) or a “useless bureaucracy” (27 per cent).

The poll also shows that opinion differs greatly between Republican and Democrat minded voters. Some 80 percent of Republicans say they are dissatisfied with Dodd-Frank, alongside 54 per cent of independent voters.

Just 35 per cent of Democrats say they are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the legislation.


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