Law and regulation

WASHINGTON — Frank Keating, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, is stepping down at the end of the year and a search for his successor has already begun.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the Fed's proper role in speeding up the payment system; the perennial TBTF debate; and the privacy implications of anti-laundering regulations.

The Subsidy Reserve Act of 2015 could solve "too big to fail" and level the playing field for smaller banks by requiring the largest financial institutions to accumulate capital equal to the amount of the market subsidy they receive.

Fannie Mae reported net income of $14.2 billion last year, a sharp decline from the record $84 billion in 2013 that was inflated by accounting for tax credits.

CFPB officials are keeping a close watch on the Qualified Mortgage and ability-to-repay rules to gauge whether further changes should be made. But mortgage numbers don't give a clear picture on what kind of impact they've had.

WASHINGTON — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will continue its work to ensure credit reports are fair and freely given to consumers, agency director Richard Cordray said Thursday.

Online banking, ATMs and other advances have curtailed face-to-face transactions, but new Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. research says the brick-and-mortar office isn't going anywhere just yet.

The FDIC is taking important steps to undo the damage caused by Operation Choke Point — but fraud prevention company Early Warning apparently didn’t get the memo.

American Express rules barring businesses from asking customers to use lower-cost credit cards violate U.S. antitrust law, a federal judge found.

Freddie Mac will return $900 million to the Treasury Department next month, bringing total payments to nearly $21 billion above what it received in federal aid after the 2008 credit crisis.

Two weeks after U.S. bank remittances to Somalia dried up, regulators and lawmakers are making only slow progress at preventing a potential humanitarian crisis.

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators extended the deadline for three nonbank firms considered "systemically important" to submit their revised resolution plans, also known as living wills.

Regulators have long worried about the risks from the underwriting of leveraged loans, but they are now concerned about the potential for broader economic risk from losses on such loans.

Right now, financial institutions are not required to know the identity of the living, breathing person behind accounts owned by legal entities. The beneficial ownership rules proposed by Fincen would help expose money launderers, tax evaders and criminals.

Encouraging the financial industry to explore faster payments is all well and good. Effectively directing it to do so, however, is beyond the Fed's authority.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who forced Wall Street's biggest banks to pay billions in fines for their roles in the subprime mortgage crisis, is pressing for action against executives at those firms, even as he prepares to leave his post.

Banks and industry groups worry that the Financial Stability Board's "total loss absorbing capacity" proposal could disrupt capital formation while reform advocates say the rules could be strengthened even further.

HSBC has spent billions of dollars in compliance and legal costs, but the damaging scandals keep coming. Renewed attention on the problems at its Swiss private bank could fuel the debate about whether banks this size are too big to manage.

Big banks have only grown larger and more complex since the financial crisis, and there is reason to doubt the efficacy of measures aimed at preventing the risk of another taxpayer bailout.

Bankers, technology CEOs and President Obama are throwing everything they have at countering the growing threat of cyber attacks, putting their faith in biometrics, tokenization and data sharing. But it's far from clear that it will be enough.