The latest in politics and policy.
Direct to your inbox.
Sign up for the Business and Economy newsletter
Welcome to The Hill’s Business & Economy newsletter
{beacon}
Business & Economy
Business & Economy
The Big Story
Financial watchdogs look for tighter grip on non-banks
Federal regulators took a major step toward overhauling the ways they look for risks in the financial system and subject certain firms to tougher oversight.
The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a group of federal bank and financial regulatory agency chiefs chaired by the Treasury secretary, proposed new rules Wednesday.
The panel approved a Wednesday proposal intended to make it easier and quicker for them to designate non-bank financial firms as “systemically important.” The designation forces the company to follow strict Dodd-Frank Act banking regulations and subjects it to tougher oversight under the 2010 financial reform law.
FSOC, which was created by Dodd-Frank, significantly boosted the threshold at which a non-bank financial was considered big or risky enough to warrant tougher oversight under former President Trump. The Wednesday proposal would reverse some of those changes, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said created “inappropriate hurdles” that “are not legally required by the Dodd-Frank Act. Nor are they useful or feasible.”
The new FSOC proposal would not completely restore Dodd-Frank to its state before the Trump administration took several steps to loosen it. Trump in 2018 signed a bipartisan bill that exempted banks with assets less than $250 billion from stricter oversight by raising the threshold for systemic importance from $50 billion.
Some Democratic lawmakers critical of the Dodd-Frank rollback bemoaned those changes after the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — both of which had assets below $250 billion but above $50 billion. Republicans and Democrats who supported those changes insisted that the higher threshold would not have protected the banks from their own mismanagement.
Welcome to The Hill’s Business & Economy newsletter, we’re Karl Evers-Hillstrom, Aris Folley and Sylvan Lane — covering the intersection of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
Monthly housing payments hit a record high this week after mortgage rates rose for the first time in more than a month, according to data from real estate brokerage Redfin.
Twitter has removed the “government-funded” labels from outlets like National Public Radio and PBS after the outlets and others protested that their accounts were flagged and many decided to leave the platform.
Twitter’s move to remove thousands of legacy verification check marks Thursday resulted in chaos as users were left scrambling to prove their authenticity in the face of fake impersonation accounts emerging.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis will release U.S. gross domestic product figures for the first quarter of 2023 on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. ET.
The Senate HELP Committee will vote on whether to advance Labor Secretary nominee Julie Su on Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET.
The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing at 1:00 p.m. ET on Thursday on “accountability and transparency” at the Internal Revenue Service with IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
SANDWICH ACADEMY GRANT TOWNSHIP, Maine (AP) — The Maine Department of Environmental Protection is taking Canadian Pacific Kansas City to task over the cleanup following a freight train derailment and fire.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) got a warm reception at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th-anniversary summit just outside Washington, D.C., on Friday, softening a difficult weak that featured a wave of Florida lawmakers endorsing former President Trump for 2024. Read more