The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee works to identify and analyze developing trends and ongoing events that promise to affect the efficiency and safe operation of sectors of the financial services industry; explore the spectrum of short- and long-term implications of emerging problems and policy changes; help develop private, regulatory and legislative responses to such problems that promote efficiency and safety and further the public interest; and to assess and respond to proposed and actual public policy initiatives with respect to the impact on the public interest.

The Committee strongly supports the SEC Chairman Schapiro's commitment to base the agency's regulatory reaction on its professional judgment underpinned with careful empirical studies and not on accommodating political pressure.

Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, will present an overview of federal agencies' plans, which outline initiatives aimed at eliminating tens of millions of hours in reporting burdens and billions of dollars in regulatory costs.

The Dodd-Frank legislation has many problems and omissions, and much is still uncertain about implementation. But the new liquidation authority provides for the possibility of making it so that future crises do not involve the bailouts of creditors that truly embodied the problem of having banks that are too big to fail.

All major EPA decisions are contentious, but the current flurry of regulatory initiatives raises unusually serious issues of costs and benefits, feasibility, methodology, and agency discretion.

The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) will discuss the latest Dodd-Frank Act developments, Basel III standards for large institutions, living wills for complex financial institutions, and Securities and Exchange Commission accounting and policy initiatives.

The Regulatory Accountability Act is an effort to channel the discretion and improve the performance of the modern administrative state.

At this luncheon press briefing, SFRC members issued statements and answered questions.