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.
