Dodd-Frank

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needs to improve its practices related to employee diversity and the inclusion of women, according to a report issued this week by the Office of the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve.

A coalition of midsize banks is preparing to oppose a bill eliminating a key Dodd-Frank Act threshold unless the language is further tweaked.

Lawmakers supported the credit union tax exemption at an industry conference on Tuesday, downplaying efforts to take another look at the issue this year as part of comprehensive tax reform.

The Subsidy Reserve Act would bring into the open the financial benefits of being "too big to fail" — benefits the big banks claim to be nonexistent.

Tiered regulation could bring about a number of useful changes for regional banks, including a more customized approach to determining capital adequacy and simplified resolution planning requirements.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Monday said that, should he run for president in 2016, his progressive platform would include breaking up the largest Wall Street banks.

The Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase were far apart last week in how much revenue the company would be making after the kind of economic shock envisioned in the Dodd-Frank stress test. The gap has JPM observers cautiously awaiting the results of this week's CCAR test.

When regulators use asset size as a yardstick, they impose unnecessary rules on larger financial institutions that employ traditional banking models.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the downside of public banking and the vulnerabilities unaddressed by global regulators' bail-in plan for megabanks.

Much of the Fed's decidedly more hawkish view on bank regulation stems from Gov. Daniel Tarullo, and some reform advocates fear that it could become less intense when he departs.

Community and regional banks should be subjected to simpler rules than very large banks, the chairman and CEO of the Buffalo, N.Y., company said. In fact, size is the wrong determinant for risk-based regulation, he said.

All 31 firms that took this year's Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test had enough capital to withstand the Fed's hypothetical severe economic scenario, but several of the largest banks were teetering on the edge of the leverage and risk-based capital requirements.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans reintroduced several hot-button bills this week, helping to set the stage for some of the political fights to come later in the year.

Loan demand continues to increase across the country, even though some economic sectors are still struggling, according to a report released Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Board.

Republicans are working to craft a Dodd-Frank regulatory relief bill this spring, but pushback on cost-benefit analysis mandates could derail the process.

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors wants Congress to adopt a formal community bank definition, based on qualitative factors such as local governance structure and business models.

The Financial Stability Board’s proposed capital and long-term debt requirements would only go part of the way toward ending the risk of government bailouts. If regulators really want to get rid of too big to fail, they need to deal with over-the-counter derivatives market.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said a review of its "qualified mortgage" rule will allow enough time to consider changes if lawmakers fail to make progress on housing finance before a key deadline.

The paper by a consultant with the Office of Financial Research said that projected losses in the 2013 and 2014 tests were "nearly perfectly correlated," suggesting that the tests have become "less informative."

Though stress tests are widely viewed as a successful and critical exercise, there are growing concerns that regulators — and the banks themselves — may have become too reliant on them, overshadowing other aspects of the supervisory process.