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U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said a bill to regulate the finance industry will likely move to the left as Democrats ride a new wave of momentum following the win on health care reform.

Corker said he and Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., had “reached a very good balance” on new financial regulations but that Dodd “left me at the altar” in a vote three weeks ago.

Bob Corker

Corker, who led Republican negotiations on the bill, spoke to a group of finance professionals Monday at the University of Memphis.

“For a lot of reasons a lot of things unraveled and, unfortunately, it will be very difficult to get it back to that point,” Corker said.

“Health care passed and all of a sudden the White House is in a very different place.”

Corker said Dodd passed “a partisan bill” through the Democratic-controlled committee because he was losing his Democratic colleagues. Also, he said, the Obama administration “realized this was a great issue for them.”

Corker said the 1,336-page bill passed out of the committee last week after 21 minutes of debate, “which to me is about as dysfunctional as can happen.”

The bill provides a mechanism for collecting and aggregating real-time financial data in order to better predict economic forces.

To deal with “too big to fail,” Corker said the bill calls for a method to oversee the orderly liquidations of large financial institutions.

The bill will also take a closer look at derivatives, financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities, because “we didn’t know where we were” with derivatives on the cusp of the economic crisis.

– Toby Sells: 529-2742

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