Established in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission is an independent regulatory agency in the United States. Its main role is to create a fair and competitive business trade in the United States. Originally established under President Wilson’s administration, the FTC was created to protect the public and businesses from unfair business trade and to formulate a strong and reliable relationship between consumers and businesses. Members of the Federal Trade Commission are appointed by the President and authorized by the Senate. Generally, the FTC is consisted of five appointed members that are sworn in for seven-year terms. However; the current structure of the FTC has only four appointed members: one chairman and three commissioners. Currently, FTC has one vacant commissioner position (FTC.gov, 2014). The current organizational chart of the FTC is constructed as follows: Edith Ramirez (Chairwoman), Julie Brill (Commissioner), Maureen Ohlhausen (Commissioner), and Joshua D. Wright (Commissioner) The Federal Trade Commission also consists of various offices, each constructed to focus on different areas of regulation and rulemaking.
The Federal Trade Commission is consisted of three bureaus and ten offices. Each bureau is intended to focus on a specific area to ensure that fair-trading is being practiced in the country. The Bureau of Competition seeks to eliminate anticompetitive business practices through the antitrust laws, ensuring that consumers receive goods and services at prices competent to their qualities. The Bureau of Consumer Protection seeks to protect consumers from unfair and fraudulent practices. Moreover, the bureau investigates individual companies and corporations to ensure that no fraudulent activity is endangering...
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... also find information on FTC’s website to repair their identity. Other areas that the FTC works on are to prevent Internet scams that claim winnings, unbelievably low cost offers, unwanted e-mails and phone calls from telemarketers, and e-mail hacking. The Federal Trade Commission regularly posts tips and guidelines that consumers may benefit from including ways to repair a credit score without falling for scams, paying an appropriate price for the quality of the product, and many other areas from which the public may benefit without any cost. The Commission also posts articles that may help consumers from being victimized by the weight-loss industry and the various ways they can use to figure out if the claims made by companies are legitimate. The public may access these and other types of information through the Federal Trade Commission’s website at www.ftc.gov.
While the widely exposed and discussed trials of WorldCom's and Tyco's top executives were all over the media, one of the most interesting cases of securities fraud was happening without any public acknowledgement.
According to federalreservehistory.org “The Federal Reserve is about the Central Bank of the United States it was created by Congress to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible and more stable monetary and financial system. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act” (federalreservehistory.org). According to investopedia.com “the Fed is headed by a government agency in Washington known as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. There are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks located in
United States has several laws that ensure that competition among businesses flow rely and new competitors get free access to the market. These laws intend to ensure fair and balanced competitive business practices. However, there are times when some businesses will do anything to gain competitive edge. USA has strong antitrust laws that prohibit fixing market price, price discrimination, conspiring boycott, monopolizing, and adopting unfair business practices. The history of Antitrust laws goes back to 1890 when Congress passed Sherman Act. In 1914, Congress passed two more acts: Federal Trade Commission Act, and Clayton Act. With some revisions, these three acts are still core antitrust acts.
Given the complex nature of the financial markets they should be regulated primarily by the SEC. Additionally since there is specific legislation enacted to regulate these markets, and then the SEC’s oversight should be the standard to which the stakeholders are held.
The Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 has 26 sections describing laws which “protects trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies” (63rd Cong.,Sess. II, 1914). The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division are bodies that enforce the federal antitrust laws which are deeply rooted in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the reform that followed the Great Depression. It made changes in the American financial regulatory environment that affect all federal financial regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation’s financial services industry. Like Glass-Steagall, the legislation passed after the Great Depression, it sought to regulate the financial markets and make another economic crisis less likely. Banks were deregulated in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and essentially allowed for the excessive risk taken on by banks that caused the most recent financial crisis. The Financial Stability Oversight Council was established through the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and was created to address the systemic risks in the United States financial system and to improve coordination among financial regulators.
The Federal Open Market Committee, consisting of the seven members of the Board of Governors and five members elected by the Federal Reserve banks, is responsible for the determination of Federal Reserve Bank policy in the purchase and sale of securities on the open market. The Federal Advisory Council, whose role is purely advisory, consists of 12 members if they meet membership qualifications.
For almost 100 years the Better Business Bureau has offered many different Services and Programs that are essential to control a trustworthy relationship between a business and the customer. The BBB is offered in 50 States and 12 provinces, and was founded in 1912. The BBB currently has a total of 400,000 North American businesses that are accredited by the BBB. The BBB is a non-profit organization that focuses mainly on advancing marketplace trust. There are 128 independently incorporated local BBB organizations in the Canada and the US, coordinated under the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB) which is situated in Washington D.C.
Imagine a challenge that tests our ideas about money and how we respond to it under certain conditions. This test involves the auction of a twenty-dollar bill with very simple rules. The highest bidder will get the bill and the second highest bidder receives nothing but pays the amount of the losing bid. As the test progresses players in the room bid above the face value ending the bid at twenty-eight dollars. The question now is, ‘Why would anyone want to pay above the face value?’ Behavioral economists believe that when decisions are made on value, the human mind often behaves irrationally. People judge value based on prior knowledge fed to them at some point in their lives and not something thoroughly researched. This is the kind of misinformed
In the article, “The Possible Benefits of the Federal Trade Commission” by Alexander W. Smith, it addresses competition in trade as warfare, and furthermore, it notes how the Federal Trade Commission is for the people (1916). This means the sum of all of the businesses, government, and politics must be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission in order to be serving the public’s best interests (Smith 1916). Smith argues the “obvious cause of the trust problem is the unlimited power to create corporations now lodged in the several states with no adequate power vested anywhere to control them” (1916). Based on this statement, it reiterates the importance how if there is not enough regulation for corporations, the public will suffer due to the
needs of business. The big business and business leaders influenced the regulation and the government worked for
The ability for the federal government to regulate businesses’ activity is given in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 is known as the commerce clause; it states, “Congress shall have the Power…to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes” (Reed, 173). Through the commerce clause, the government is able to regulate business activity by the use of administrative agencies, which is defined as “a governmental regulatory body that controls and supervises a particular activity or area of public interest and administers and enforces a particular body of law related to that activity or interest” (Administrative Agency, 1). There are two types of regulatory authority that agencies may possess; quasi-legislative and/or quasi-judicial. Quasi-legislative means that agencies can make rules and regulations that have the same impact as a law created by federal legislation. Quasi-judicial authority gives agencies the power to make rulings, just like in federal courts.
The FTC deceives consumers by using advertisement weight-loss and as a result it has collected almost $107 million since 2010 (Giorgianni, 2014). In addition, people need to increase their awareness of fad diets by knowing the negative impacts of it.
The term federal regulation is used by the government to implement public policy. The process of rulemaking can be a long and extensive process. It is sometimes viewed as vital to the definition and implementation of public policy in the United States. According to Longest (2009), “Implementing organizations, primarily the departments and agencies in
In 1934 the Securities Exchange Act created the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was created to protect U.S. investors against malpractice in securities and financial markets. The purpose of the SEC was and still is to carry out the mandates of the Securities Act of 1933: To protect investors and maintain the integrity of the securities market by amending the current laws, creating new laws and seeing to it that those laws are enforced.