Sir Barney Frank, the openly gay former US congressman who left an indelible mark on global financial regulation, has died at 86. The news, confirmed by family sources, marks the end of a political career that blended fierce advocacy for LGBTQ rights with a near-evangelical belief in financial oversight, particularly at the transatlantic level.
Frank, who served as a Democratic representative from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013, was perhaps best known in these pages for his co-authorship of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. That sprawling piece of legislation, enacted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, was intended to rein in the worst excesses of Wall Street: tighter leverage limits, stress tests for big banks, and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. To many in the City of London, it was a cautionary tale of regulatory overreach. To Frank, it was necessary surgery on a system riddled with moral hazard.
The man himself was a study in contradictions. A lifelong bachelor until his marriage to Jim Ready in 2012, Frank was openly gay on Capitol Hill long before such candour was politically expedient. His wit was as sharp as his grasp of complex financial instruments. During the 2008 crisis, when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson proposed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Frank famously warned against handing a blank cheque to the banks. 'This is not about ideology, it's about arithmetic,' he said, channelling the sort of fiscal realism that endears politicians to markets, if not always to voters.
Yet for all his focus on domestic regulation, Frank was an internationalist. He was a vocal champion of closer ties between US and British financial markets, believing that co-ordinated oversight could reduce regulatory arbitrage. In 2009, he told a group of London bankers that 'no bank should be too big to fail,' a sentiment that still echoes in Bank of England corridors. His death will be felt on both sides of the Atlantic.
The bond markets, predictably, will not pause. The 10-year US Treasury yield will tick on, and the dollar will continue its daily dance. But for those of us who remember the darkest days of 2008, Frank's passing is a reminder of an era when politicians actually read the fine print of bills before signing them. His legacy is the Dodd-Frank Act, a document so dense that bank compliance officers still complain about its 'regulatory tax.'
Frank himself was aware of the criticism, but his defence was typically blunt: 'If you don't want regulation, don't cause a crisis.' It is a line that could serve as an epitaph for a man who understood that in finance, the bottom line is ultimately trust. And trust, as he knew better than most, requires a referee.
The 2010 act has since been partially rolled back under the Trump administration, but its core tenets remain. More importantly, Frank's example of adversarial accountability in a world of political spin will be sorely missed. In a career spanning three decades, he never lost his ability to surprise or his belief that markets, for all their efficiency, need a visible hand. Now that hand has been stilled.
