Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown likes to brag about how he helped pass the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Here’s a campaign commercial he put out about this claim:
But something curious happened exactly one week after he voted with the majority of the Senate to pass the bill. Morgan Stanley’s Political Action Committee gave him a $2,500 check.
If the Dodd-Frank bill was so tough, why is it that one of Wall Street’s most infamous institutions would give Brown a large check a week after he voted to pass it?
What Scott doesn’t mention in his boasting is that he was the swing vote in the Senate that worked to make the financial reform law more bank-friendly. He successfully forced Democrats to abandon a bank tax and weakened the Volcker Rule. He also voted against killing “naked credit default swaps,” a financial instrument that the European Parliament partially banned in 2011. Morgan Stanley famously lost billions of dollars in its dealings with credit default swaps.
“I’ll work with anyone to get things done,” Brown brags in the commercial above. “Anyone” apparently includes mega-banks like Morgan Stanley whose risky behavior caused a Great Recession we’re all still living with.