Regulation

The Treasury Department said Thursday it plans to auction off pools of the preferred stock it owns in small banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Coastal Banking Company in Beaufort, S.C., has become the latest community bank to take advantage of a new law that relieves small banks from the burden of filing financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A day after top bankers met with Federal Reserve officials, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon blamed policymakers for stalling banking's recovery by "shooting ourselves in the foot."

Industry groups are calling on CFPB to lower the thresholds it will use to designate which firms will be included in its nonbank supervision program.

The Justice Department's antitrust division is probing Visa's new pricing system, signaling that regulators are still paying very close attention to how Visa and MasterCard set the fees for accepting and processing debit cards.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will testify before Congress next Tuesday regarding efforts to allow more Americans to refinance their mortgages.

The central bank on Wednesday said it discussed the Volcker Rule and proposed counterparty limits at a private meeting with the leaders of several big banks, including Brian Moynihan of Bank of America Corp.

MasterCard's first-quarter profit rose 21% from a year earlier, as the payments network picked up debit card business in the wake of new regulations.

Marking its official exit from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Regions Financial (RF) in Birmingham announced Wednesday that it has repurchased the warrant it sold to the Treasury Department as part of the program.

The gods of irony must be alive and well at American Banker. It's hard to think of a better explanation for the April 30 tirade against "deadbeats" from Andrew Kahr — whose approach to the credit business was described this way in a front-page San Francisco Chronicle news story in 2002: