
Resurrecting the Office of Financial Research
The Office of Financial Research (“OFR”) was created by the Dodd-Frank Act to help address the gaps in data availability and analysis that had hampered governmental authorities in their response to the financial crisis of 2008. It was hoped that the OFR would serve as an “early warning system” that would detect emerging systemic risks through data collection and analysis, but the OFR never really had the opportunity to live up to its promise. During the Obama administration, it suffered from an unsupportive Treasury Department and pushback from other federal financial regulatory agencies; under the Trump administration, the staff and … Read more