Who's who in the race-turned-marathon to lead OCC

The latest candidate to be mentioned as a potential nominee for comptroller, Saule Omarova, has taught financial services law at Cornell University since 2014.

The New York Times reported recently that the administration was vetting Omarova for the job.

Before working in academia, she served in the George W. Bush-era Treasury Department as a special advisor in domestic finance, and she also worked as an associate in Davis Polk’s financial institutions group until 2006.

Omarova has expressed skepticism about fintech policy and crypto technology. In a textbook chapter published in April, for instance, she described the basic appeal of decentralized finance and cryptocurrency — a "trustless" system that does not rely on fallible intermediaries, such as banks or other brokers — as "a naïve view of the sources and dynamics of power in finance."

"While computer code does not possess humans’ subjective capacity for greed, it is written by humans prone to making mistakes — and, importantly, for humans driven by greed and other subjective motives," Omarova wrote.

She has also advocated for substantial reforms of the wider banking system. In another recent paper, she argued in favor of what she described as the “People’s Ledger,” in which banks’ customer deposits would be migrated en masse to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet as a way to secure and “democratize” the financial system.

“Without the federal subsidy attached to demand deposits, banks’ riskier investments and activities — as well as those deemed less critical from the public policy perspective — will be directly subject to market discipline,” Omarova wrote. “Banks, in other words, will not be ‘special’ anymore. By separating their lending function from their monetary function, the proposed reform will effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it.”

The Biden administration announced in May that Michael Hsu would serve as acting comptroller of the currency. Now three months into the job, he’s widely seen as a candidate for the full-time, Senate-confirmed role.

Hsu, a longtime Fed official who managed the agency's large- bank supervision, has already had a significant impact on the OCC since taking the reins of the agency — though he’s stressed that his authority as an acting director is less than that of a Senate-confirmed comptroller.

But his tenure so far has still been busy. Already, Hsu has restructured the agency’s leadership to give him direct oversight of the OCC’s bank supervision practice, directed the OCC to join the Network for Greening the Financial System — an international body of regulators attempting to identify the risks of climate change among financial institutions — and has officially committed to rescinding the Trump-era reform of the Community Reinvestment Act.

While Hsu has not commented publicly on his odds of eventually receiving an official nomination to the office he currently holds, some analysts have pointed to those policy moves and other actions as clear signs he will be in the comptroller’s chair for some time.

As president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Raphael Bostic became a prominent voice among the country’s regulators for urging a more direct focus on equity and racial justice in the financial system following the police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. He has called on the Fed to pursue “maximum employment” as one way to head off racial inequality.

Under the Obama administration, Bostic served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Before joining the Atlanta Fed, he taught courses on public policy at the University of Southern California. Like some other comptroller candidates, Bostic was also floated as a potential candidate for Treasury secretary before Janet Yellen ultimately secured the job.