Overnight Finance: House Dem whip vows strong support for Ex-Im

TOMORROW STARTS TONIGHT: MOMENTUM BUILDS FOR REAUTHORIZATION. Mike Lillis for The Hill: Democrats will provide near-unanimous support in the effort to force a vote on reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has refused to vote on renewing the bank, leading its Republican supporters to take a rare stab at sidestepping their own party leaders to force the bill to the floor with a discharge petition. That effort, led by Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), would require the endorsement of 218 lawmakers.

{mosads}Hoyer said the Democrats would provide a vast majority of those signatures — provided Fincher can find a sufficient number of Republicans to make up the difference.

“I expect a large number of Republicans and I expect almost every Democrat [will sign the petition],” Hoyer told reporters in the Capitol. “If … we can discharge it, you know, we will want to support that effort.” http://bit.ly/1OjkehK

THIS IS OVERNIGHT FINANCE, and what a week in Washington. Tweet: @kevcirilli; email: kcirilli@digital-stage.thehill.com; and subscribe: http://digital-stage.thehill.com/signup/48. Back to work…

THE ’47 PERCENT’ IS NOW THE ’45 PERCENT,’ via Bernie Becker: Mitt Romney’s 47 percent is now 45.3 percent. The Tax Policy Center says that’s now the number of households who don’t pay any income taxes, an almost five percentage point increase over the 2013 estimate of 40.4 percent. Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, took a political hit when he used a previous Tax Policy Center estimate to assert that the 47 percent who didn’t pay income taxes would support President Obama.

The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, says this year’s increase is largely due to more precise projections about who actually pays taxes. In other words, as the Center’s Roberton Williams put it: “Those additional non-payers were there all the time — we just failed to count them.” http://bit.ly/1JQr2x4

DEMS: PASS SYRIAN REFUGEE BILL, via Jordain Carney: Twenty-seven Senate Democrats are calling on Congress to pass an emergency funding bill to help respond to the Syrian refugee crisis. http://bit.ly/1LfShGH

REALITY CHECK: FANNIE, FREDDIE CONSERVATORSHIPS ARE HERE TO STAY, via John Carney in WSJ: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain both wards of the state and central to the mortgage market. While nearly everyone professes to find this unsatisfactory, the status quo is bound by a tight knot of the political and practical that isn’t going to unravel anytime soon. The political problem is simple: all past efforts to pass major reforms have stalled out. And now that we’re into the U.S. presidential election season, further progress is extremely unlikely.

“Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn, made that clear on a panel Tuesday when asked about how long the now seven-year-old conservatorships of Fannie and Freddie might last. He replied that Congress wouldn’t take on housing- finance reform–or any other issue that requires ‘intellectual heft’ or ‘tough decision-making’–for at least the next year and four months. In other words, not until after the next president takes office…

“Both mortgage giants still require the support of the U.S. government to maintain the confidence of bond markets. Any attempt to ‘release’ them from conservatorship and end their ability to draw from Treasury backstops when and if needed would risk throwing global capital markets into chaos and crashing the housing market. Recapitalization is also a non-starter. A quick recap would require a direct capital injection, which isn’t possible without new Congressional spending authorization.

“And a slow recap, funded by allowing Fannie and Freddie to retain their earnings instead of paying them to the government, would be an extremely long slog. A recent paper from Moody’s Analytics and the Urban Institute estimated that a retained earnings recap could take 18 years even if they never paid another dividend to Treasury. In short, the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t going away anytime soon.” http://on.wsj.com/1Gv5C8r

FIDUCIARY FIGHT: FORMER SEC CHAIRS BACK ADVISER STANDARDS, via Megan Leonhardt for WealthManagement.com: “A trio of former Securities and Exchange Commission chairs say that the agency needs to move forward immediately on a uniform fiduciary standard for financial advisors that regulates based on job functions, rather than what job title professionals hold…

— WHO WANTS IT: Mary Schapiro, SEC chair from 2009 to 2012; Harvey Pitt, who served as SEC chair from 2001 to 2003; Christopher Cox, who chaired the SEC from 2005 to 2009. They made the remarks during TD Ameritrade’s Advocacy Leaders Summit in Washington D.C. http://bit.ly/1PgURha

 

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