#Senate Banking

13 02, 2025

FedFin on: Debanking Prohibition

2025-02-14T16:41:33-05:00February 13th, 2025|The Vault|

Reflecting broad political agreement that debanking should be prevented, a senior Senate Republican has introduced legislation that would effectively terminate a bank’s ability to do business upon any finding that it had denied fair access to anyone within its full range of retail and wholesale customers within the geographic areas the bank chooses to serve.  The bill’s definition of fair access is expansive, for example permitting pricing differentiation only based on “proportionate” considerations that do not appear to consider factors such as a product’s or customer base’s relative profitability.  Banks would likely err on …

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4 12, 2023

Karen Petrou: Why Curbing Banks Won’t Curtail Private Credit

2023-12-04T11:03:15-05:00December 4th, 2023|The Vault|

Last Wednesday, Sens. Brown and Reed wrote to the banking agencies pressing them to cut the cords they believe unduly bind big banks to private-credit companies.  The IMF and Bank of England have also pointed to systemic-risk worries in this sector, as have I.  Still, FSOC is certainly silent and perhaps even sanguine.  This is likely because FSOC is all too often nothing more than the “book-report club” Rohit Chopra described, but it’s also because it plans to use its new systemic-risk standards to govern nonbanks outside the regulatory perimeter by way of cutting the banking-system connections pressed by the senators.  Nice thought, but the combination of pending capital rules and the limits of FSOC’s reach means it’s likely to be just thought, not the action needed ahead of the private-credit sector’s fast-rising systemic risk.

One might think that banks would do all they can to curtail private-credit competitors rather than enable them as the senators allege and much recent data substantiate.  But big banks back private capital because big banks will do the business they can even when regulators block them from doing the business they want.  Jamie Dimon for one isn’t worried that JPMorgan will find itself out in the cold.

Of course, sometimes banks should be forced out of high-risk businesses.  There is some business banks shouldn’t do because it’s far too risky for entities with direct and implicit taxpayer backstops.  This is surely the case with some of the wildly-leveraged loans private-credit companies …

20 11, 2023

Karen Petrou: The Fate of the End-Game Rules Does not Lie in the FDIC’s Hands

2023-11-20T12:16:01-05:00November 20th, 2023|The Vault|

It’s a hard fact of life that nothing good comes to federal agencies caught up in scandal even when scandal is misplaced.  So the real question for the FDIC is whether the bad already all too evident at the divided banking agency will grow still worse, threatening the FDIC’s ability to participate in pending rulemakings or, even worse, resolutions.  It likely will be no accident if the FDIC comes unglued and the capital and other proposals fall apart.  I think new rules will proceed, but the FDIC’s threat is far from out of the blue.

Is this cynical?  I prefer to think of it as an observation born of experience, but this is a city about which Harry S. Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

FedFin reports last week tracked Marty Gruenberg’s travails before Senate Banking and then again at House Financial Services, with Ranking Member Waters surprisingly aligning herself with her usual GOP enemies when it came to castigating Mr. Gruenberg over sexual-harassment problems at the agency reported by the Wall Street Journal as the week of hearings broke two days before.

And, as the hearing went on, Mr. Gruenberg found himself in even more of a pickle.  In another uncoincidental moment, Chairman McHenry got wind of 2008 allegations against the chair, allegations Mr. Gruenberg belatedly recalled when prompted by yet another poke from the Journal.  Now, Mr. McHenry has opened a formal investigation even as a statement from GOP members of …

20 07, 2023

FedFin on: Senate Banking Kicks Deposit-Insurance Reform Down the Road

2023-07-21T17:03:13-04:00July 20th, 2023|The Vault|

In the wake of today’s Senate Banking deposit-insurance reform hearing, it seems certain that there will be no legislation in the near term and most likely in this Congress to increase FDIC-insurance thresholds.  Although the FDIC recommended a new approach to transaction accounts in its policy review following recent bank failures (see Client Report DEPOSITINSURANCE119), Senators on both sides of the aisle demurred.  Chairman Brown (D-OH) made it clear that any change in FDIC-coverage limits is conditioned on final, tougher bank regulations, essentially telling banks that successfully opposing new rules means keeping FDIC coverage as is….

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10 07, 2023

Karen Petrou: The Bankruptcy of Bank-Merger Policy

2023-07-10T14:18:07-04:00July 10th, 2023|The Vault|

On Wednesday, a Senate Banking subcommittee will consider bank-merger policy, surely providing a platform for its chair, Sen. Warren’s pronounced views opposing all but the smallest bank mergers and maybe not even those.  Many other senators are not as adamant, but even pro-business Republicans – see J.D. Vance – think bank mergers beyond the itty-bitty are at best problematic.  The politics of this debate is obvious; the substance not so much.  As with many other questions, bank-merger policy is best set with a keen understanding of recent, objective research and what it actually says about concentration as it occurs outside the gaze of those fearful only of still bigger big banks.

That there is undue market power in a financialized economy that brings a raft of woes is all too clear.  I thus hoped that Assistant Attorney General Kanter’s remarks last month would be a meaningful update of the Department of Justice’s anachronistic 1995 policy.  It helped, but only a bit because Mr. Kanter focused principally on enforcement, leaving “broader” questions solely to the banking agencies.

They in turn have long promised a transparent merger policy, but it’s still deal-by-deal, case-by-case, crisis-by-crisis.  More than a few mid-sized banks will wither away as deliberations continue because the sheer uncertainty and delays of most bank mergers undermine their economic value, particularly at a time of high interest rates, slow or no growth, tough new rules, and withering competition.

Recent antitrust research does not substantiate easy, blanket assertions about the benefits or …

3 07, 2023

Karen Petrou: The Unintended Consequence Of Capital Hikes Isn’t Less Credit, It’s More Risk

2023-07-03T12:08:54-04:00July 3rd, 2023|The Vault|

As was evident throughout Chairman Powell’s most recent appearances before HFSC and Senate Banking, conflict between capital and credit availability characterizes what is to come of the “end-game” capital rules set for imminent release.  The trade-off is said to be between safer banks and a sound economy, but this is far too simple.  As we’ve seen over and over again as capital rules rise, credit availability stays the same or even increases.  What changes is who makes the loans and what happens to borrowers and the broader macro framework, which in the past has been irrevocably altered.  The real trade-off is thus between lending from banks and the stable financial intermediation this generally ensures and lending from nonbanks and the risks this raises not just to financial stability, but also to economic equality.

As post-2008 history makes clear, banks do not stop lending when capital requirements go up; they stop taking certain balance-sheet risks based on how the sum total of often-conflicting risk-based, leverage, and stress-test rules drives their numbers.  That all these rules push and pull banks in often-different directions is at long last known to the Fed based on Vice Chair Barr’s call for a “holistic review”.  Whether it plans to do anything about them and their adverse impact on the future of regulated financial intermediation remains to be seen.  Until something is done, banks will look across the spectrum of capital rules, spot the highest requirement, and then figure out how best to remain profitable …

27 06, 2023

FedFin on: Failed-Bank Compensation, Resolution

2023-06-27T16:13:11-04:00June 27th, 2023|The Vault|

The Senate Banking Committee has overwhelmingly approved bipartisan legislation to reform executive compensation following larger insured-depository institution (IDI) failures, with parent-company executive compensation also at risk in some circumstances.  Unlike previous bipartisan claw-back legislation, this measure is targeted to incentive compensation, not salary, expressly exempts “white knights,” institution-affiliated persons and directors, and gives the FDIC discretion also to allow senior officers to retain affected compensation in certain other circumstances…

The full report is available to retainer clients. To find out how you can sign up for the service, click here and here.poor management practice.

 

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10 04, 2023

Karen Petrou: Why the Fed is a Repeat Offender

2023-04-10T17:29:46-04:00April 10th, 2023|The Vault|

As we noted in a recent report, a divided Congress that may not even be able to keep the U.S. Government in business is one unlikely to enact substantive financial reform.  Thus, we’re in for yet another episode of political damage control, regulatory excuses, and a few heads on enforcement spikes without meaningful, measurable, and accountable supervisory reform.  Been there, done that, had another financial crash, or so my dispiriting read of recent efforts to force post-crash supervisory reform makes all too clear.  It’s probably too much to ask that Congress not flit off to the next election before it ensures meaningful regulatory-agency accountability for manifold supervisory lapses, but if it does what it usually does, then we are doomed to more crashes with worse consequences unless it and the White House force the Fed to do what it’s never done before:  meaningfully and transparently improve supervisory rigor and enforcement might.

In my memo three weeks ago, I showed how regulators by 2001 had failed to act on the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s before the largest bank failure at the time presaged the great financial crisis hot on its heels.  After the GFC, the U.S. convened the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).  When it issued its report in 2011, it drew scathing conclusions not only about all the “light-touch” regulation before the crash, but also supervisory unwillingness or inability to ensure that what rules there were were rules that were obeyed.

Despite this report and …

20 03, 2023

Karen Petrou: Three Fast, Urgent Fixes to U.S. Bank Supervision and One Major Change to End Bailouts

2023-03-20T11:35:24-04:00March 20th, 2023|The Vault|

In the wake of recent bank failures, much has rightly been said about how supervisors failed to act even though warning claxons blared.  Nothing that happened to Silvergate, SVB, or Signature is due to forces beyond supervisory control, but there are deep, structural weaknesses in how banks have long been supervised.  How long?  I went back to my 2001 Senate Banking testimony about what was then the largest-ever failure to find that many of the lessons that should have been learned never sunk in.

Given that this hearing was in 2001, a good deal of what I said about bank capital requirements was about Basel I and is thus long out of date.  However, one key point isn’t:  the capital triggers used to spark prompt corrective action (PCA) were and are an unduly-simplistic way to identify the need for rapid supervisory intervention.

Silvergate, SVB, and Signature were all “well” capitalized right up to the brink of collapse because each of the banks in its own way arbitraged the capital rules to enormous – and obvious – advantage.  Nothing in law or rule bars bank supervisors from stepping in well before PCA ratios sink but nothing seems to stir supervisors to do so.  1991’s PCA requirements were an important advance at the time, but it was outdated only a decade later.  Now, it’s a dangerous supervisory distraction.

What else noted in 2001 remains an urgent fix?  Over two decades ago, I urged the FDIC to reinstate the high-growth early-warning system it …

13 03, 2023

FedFin First Take: Failure Fall-out

2023-03-15T16:50:33-04:00March 13th, 2023|The Vault|

As we noted last night, the President concurred with Treasury, the Fed, and FDIC in deciding that SVB’s Friday failure and imminent runs on Signature Bank and, most likely, others posed a systemic risk.  This determination permits the FDIC to override all the efforts to end the moral hazard feared when uninsured depositors are fully protected in bank resolutions and came with a new Fed facility making it still easier for banks to obtain liquidity from the Federal Reserve.  As we also observed, much effort is being made to assert that none of these backstops is a bailout, a conclusion sure to draw considerable discussion and dissent even from those who concur that the scale of potential run risk Monday morning could not otherwise have been averted.  With this risk hopefully now resolved, much policy and political debate will begin about the Administration’s decision; why Silicon Valley Bank was so vulnerable;…

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