FSOC

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) has rescinded its 2013 decision to designate Prudential Financial, Inc., the largest life insurance company in the country, as a systemically-important financial institution (SIFI) under Section 113 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The lifting of Prudential’s SIFI designation leaves FSOC absent any nonbank entities to treat as systemically important.

Find out what factors the council took into consideration in making the decision.

Determining that its market activities did not pose significant systemic economic risk, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) announced that Zions Bank will not be treated as a designated nonbank financial company upon completion of its merger with Zions Bancorporation.

In its final decision, FSOC noted arguments Zions stressed in a written submission advocating for the regulators not to subject the company to enhanced regulatory scrutiny reserved for large nonbank financial institutions, and argued that any two entities could structure a merger that subverted Section 117 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Find out more details about the merger and the council’s decision.

The House recently passed a pair of bipartisan measures tweaking Federal Reserve stress tests and the process of determining which financial institutions should undergo the most rigorous testing.

H.R. 4061, otherwise known as the “Financial Stability Oversight Council Improvement Act,” and H.R. 4293, also known as the “Stress Test Improvement Act of 2017,” seek to address concerns expressed on both sides of the political aisle.

Find out more about more about what the two bills could mean for nonbank financial companies supervised by the Fed.

After months of advocacy, financial trade associations were pleased by the Senate’s 67-31 vote in favor of S. 2155, also known as the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.

The Senate also passed amendments to the bill which, among other things, would apply to international banks with more than $250 billion in total assets.

Find out what provisions various trade associations support as the bill heads to the House and what Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) hopes can be done with it before it is passed on to the president.

The Senate did not vote on several of President Donald Trump’s nominees for roles in his administration during their last session of 2017. Per Senate statutes regarding returning presidential nominations, Trump recently renewed many of his previous nominations, but not all.

Among those receiving a second cabinet nod from Trump are candidates for roles at the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Financial Stability and Oversight Council.

Find out which previously nominated individual has not been nominated again. 

The House’s recent passage of H.R. 3312, the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act, has drawn support from some in the financial industry who long have championed rethinking the process for designating institutions as systemically-important.

The legislation, which passed with bipartisan support, goes a step further than the Senate’s regulatory relief plan, which also proposes to amend the process.

Learn more about what the legislation proposes to do and what the industry and members of Congress have to say. 

The Financial Stability Oversight Council has published its 2017 annual report, noting among other things the council’s position that regulations must be recalibrated to help promote economic growth.

The report details significant financial market and regulatory developments, how an influx of private capital could benefit the secondary mortgage market, potential emerging threats to the nation’s financial stability, recommendations for promoting financial stability and the council’s activities.

Find out more details about what recommendations the report contains. 

The Office of Financial Research will need a new leader as of the first of the year as OFR Director Richard Berner has decided to step down.

Berner, who was confirmed by the Senate on Jan. 1, 2013, cited family as a motivating factor in his decision to resign.

Read on to find out what Berner and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had to say about the decision for the office’s only director to leave. 

The opening day of the American Bankers Association (ABA) annual convention in Chicago featured a number of high-profile speakers.

Maybe the most watched speaker, though, was the director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn. Cohn, the former president and chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, joined ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols on stage to discuss banking and the economy.

Among the topics addressed were SIFI asset thresholds, regulatory reform, the future of tax reform and the focus put on cyber and data security. Read on for more.

The Senate recently introduced a bill intended to provide the Federal Reserve flexibility when designating bank holding companies as systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) by allowing the Fed to make such determinations based on an entity’s activities, not size.

The bipartisan legislation introduced by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) is similar to a House bill Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) introduced in November 2016 and again in July 2017.

Find out what the legislators and the financial industry have to say about the proposed legislative pieces.