Fed vice chairman: Bank will boost transparency, take ‘fresh look’ at rules

Federal Reserve vice chairman of supervision Randal Quarles said Tuesday that the central bank will soon ask for public feedback on how it can be more transparent.

Quarles, who oversees Fed financial regulation, said the bank will take “a fresh look” at regulations during his tenure, according to Reuters.

“As I have come into the job I have perceived quite an openness in the deep-state Fed to taking a fresh look, which I found very encouraging,” Quarles told a banking conference in New York.

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Quarles was sworn in Monday as the Fed’s first vice chairman of supervision, a position created by the Dodd-Frank Act to help implement the sweeping new rules the bill imposed on banks.

The position had been vacant until Quarles filled it, though former Fed Governor Dan Tarullo handled much of the job’s responsibilities until his retirement in April.

Fed Governor Jerome Powell, Trump’s nominee to chair the Fed, took over for Tarullo until Quarles was sworn in.

Quarles will be a key member of the broad Trump administration effort to roll back and pare down parts of Dodd-Frank. Quarles has offered few specifics about changes he’ll seek, but said he will focus on making stress tests and capital requirements for banks “simpler” and “much more transparent.”

During his July confirmation hearing, Quarles said he wanted transparency “to be a theme of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory activities” and called for a “much simpler, clearer, less kaleidoscopic construction of the regulatory system that would make it easier to understand where risk is and where risk isn’t.”

The Fed and the financial sector have fought for years about the central bank’s secrecy over its stress test criteria, used to determine if financial institutions can withstand another crisis.

Quarles has also backed several changes to Dodd-Frank that had been supported by Tarullo and other moderate regulators: clarifying the Volcker Rule, lowering the thresholds at which banks are subjected to stress tests, and simplifying rules on how much cash community banks should have.