Chairman Spencer Bachus

With this month marking the second anniversary of passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Financial Services Committee is focusing attention throughout July on the burdens this law’s 2,300 pages and more than 400 new rules layer on American companies, financial markets and consumers.

Supporters of Dodd-Frank sold it to the public as “tough Wall Street reform,” but in reality its red tape hurts businesses and small town banks far from Wall Street that had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis.

Small town banks like Gothenburg State Bank in Gothenburg, Nebraska.  This bank is 1,362 miles from Wall Street.  But listen to what its chairman and president, Matthew H. Williams, said in testimony to the Committee about the pressures resulting from the “hundreds of new regulations” of Dodd-Frank:

“These pressures are slowly but surely strangling the traditional community banks, and handicapping their ability to meet the credit needs of their communities.”