Regulation

Dodd-Frank has had "crushing impact" on banks and businesses according report from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Four New York thrifts — Dime Savings, CMS, NorthEast Community and Fairport Savings — received approval Monday to switch from federal to state charters, adding to a growing list of converts nationwide.

Neither the FSOC nor the OFR is up and running well enough to address systemic risk. The Systemic Risk Council, a new private-sector nonprofit group, will likely change that.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency provided an update Tuesday to its pilot program designed to turn foreclosed properties into rental homes, saying it had announced the first round of winning bidders.

Solera National Bank in Lakewood, Colo., has been freed from a consent order under which it had been operating for more than two years.

For some bankers, doing well by doing bad has become a way of life. If ever there was a time to raise the cost of wrongdoing, Liborgate is it.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners will hold a hearing on possible abuses in August. Yet a key regulator doubts the industry is seriously troubled.

Lending to American consumers, businesses and other entities is, as best practiced, far from a simple business. Going beyond this to dabble in opaque markets will inevitably degrade the competence with which banks' basic business is conducted.

Though banks must show they are resolvable, a financial institution can also use its resolution plan to advocate preferred solutions to issues on the horizon. And other lessons from the process so far.

Bankers are concerned about how sharing information with the Consumer Financial Protection Agency will affect client confidentiality. "Typically, information given to a third party loses attorney-client privilege, and prior legislation formally exempted the other bank regulators from that rule," writes American Banker's Joe Adler. "But Dodd-Frank did not expressly include the CFPB in that exemption.”