Politics

Anne Balcer, formerly of Forbright Bank, will take on the role previously held by Karen Thomas, whose retirement was announced last month.

The agency’s mission is popular with the public, which has a long memory when it comes to the past misdeeds of the banking industry.

In a speech at the Bank of England, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board gave her strongest endorsement to date for the benefits of a central bank digital currency. 

After the Supreme Court struck down an Environmental Protection Agency rule, legal observers are wondering how far the justices will go to rein in the authority of financial regulators. A Securities and Exchange Commission proposal on climate risk disclosures could become a test case.

U.S. senators led by Democrats Bob Menendez, Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed told seven of the country’s biggest banks they must do more for consumers defrauded by scammers on Zelle, the person-to-person payments network the firms jointly own.

Former Federal Reserve Gov. Daniel Tarullo and two Fed economists argue that the Federal Home Loan banks have expanded into activities that pose risks to financial stability.

Citigroup’s planned sale of its Banamex unit should go to Mexican investors and avoid mass firings, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, adding new restrictions that may undermine some of the bids. 

Michael Barr, awaiting confirmation as the Federal Reserve’s top regulator, wants to holistically rethink the central bank’s capital requirements. Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, has some ideas on how to do that.

A return of the Supervision Appeals Review Committee is a step backward for banks looking for an unbiased venue to challenge adverse regulatory rulings.

Michael Hsu has been acting comptroller for about 14 months. Since President Biden’s choice to lead the agency withdrew from consideration late last year, the White House has not floated any new names for his potential successor.

The Federal Reserve System is facing increasing demands from the Senate to revamp the process for granting master accounts, disclose more information to the public and pick more diverse leaders. That pressure makes executive searches at the Kansas City and Chicago Fed banks more complicated.

A decision narrowing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency could be enough for other industries, banking included, to push back against novel interpretations of regulatory powers.

House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters is the second top Democratic lawmaker to dress down the megabank in recent weeks. Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown wrote a similar letter to Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf in late May.

In a new interpretative rule filed Tuesday, the agency gave states a green light to expand on federal laws that protect consumers from unfair treatment by credit reporting agencies.

The next generation of Senate Banking Committee Republicans has signed on to the latest salvo by Patrick Toomey — who will soon leave Congress — against the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. That means the master accounts issue will live on.

Large banks are facing an increasingly difficult challenge on environmental and social issues: balancing the demands of progressive activists and their own employees with those of Republican state officials. One analyst calls it the “goldilocks dynamic.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and three bank trade groups said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s anti-discrimination policy exceeds its legal authority. 

Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is laying the groundwork to potentially declare that Facebook and another Big Tech firms pose risks to consumers.

It appeared Orion Credit Union had a green light to purchase Financial Federal Bank. But the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions has once again asked a judge to stop the deal, claiming depositors would be "irreparably harmed" if it goes through.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo joined Citigroup in pledging to expand benefits to cover travel for out-of-state abortions. Smaller banks in blue states were more vocal, with one female CEO saying: “I stand in disbelief.”