The passage of Wall Street reforms by Congress helps the US economic recovery now under way by easing uncertainty that had been holding back investment, Vice President Joe Biden said on Sunday. Biden told the ABC program "This Week" that financial regulation legislation passed on Thursday would encourage businesses that were hesitant about expanding to move ahead.
"The very uncertainty they had (has) now been settled by the passage of the reforms. They didn't know which way they were going to go. They didn't know how much was going to happen," he said in an interview.
The Senate gave final congressional approval to the sweeping shake-up of rules designed to tighten financial industry oversight, limit risky lending practices at the root of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and create a consumer watchdog agency.
"It's passed. And they're going to know how to deal with it," Biden said. The bill, more than a year in the making, is set to be signed into law by President Barack Obama on Wednesday.
It joins healthcare reform as another key legislative achievement by Obama this year as his fellow Democrats try to maintain control of the House of Representatives and Senate in congressional elections on November 2.
Biden said another headwind confronting the U.S economy had been the European debt crisis, centered on Greece and Spain, "that put a real brake on an awful lot of people in terms of their optimism about where the world economy was going." "I think you see stabilisation on the European side, in terms of the so-called euro and the Eurozone. And I think that's going to help," Biden said.
A massive European taxpayer rescue package eased fears of default by sovereign borrowers, while stress tests of the bloc's largest banks are being conducted to assure investors that the region's financial system is sound.