Politics

Under federal law, individuals with criminal records must receive government approval to work at a bank. Leeway has been granted over the years, but now the industry plans to lobby Congress to eliminate major hiring hurdles.

Fearing government intrusion, financial institutions’ own clients rallied against the Biden administration plan for their account information to be shared with the IRS. Their involvement added weight to the industry’s opposition.

A new proposal to allow the Small Business Administration to offer credit directly would pull customers away from community lenders, writes the head of a credit union trade group.

Senior congressional Democrats are concerned that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — an arm of the Treasury Department — is dragging its feet on a rulemaking to require corporations to report their beneficial owners.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell defended the central bank’s work to examine the effects of a warming planet on the financial system, but said decisions such as whether banks should lend to fossil fuel companies are best left to “elected representatives.”

Hunt, who joined the CBA in 2009, has been a vocal critic of the federal student loan program and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure. He plans to leave the trade group next summer.

Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu previewed but provided little detail about the “high-level … supervisory expectations” for large institutions. His statement was one of several by regulators to coincide with an international climate change summit.

New York and other states have been far ahead of federal policymakers when it comes to crafting a supervisory structure for cryptocurrencies. The recent White House report on stablecoins ignored their work, and that was a mistake.

Lawmakers from both parties are pushing for legislation to automatically substitute a new interest rate benchmark for the expiring London interbank offered rate in certain hard-to-amend legacy contracts.

Maria Vullo, former superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, plans to enter next year’s race for state attorney general, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The relaxation of Community Reinvestment Act and fair-lending enforcement by the OCC after President Trump took office deprived minority and low-income applicants in Memphis who sought credit from the bank for far too long.

Scott Anderson, president and CEO of Zions Bank, was recently elected chair of the American Bankers Association. In an interview, he encouraged Washington to scrutinize tech giants’ moves into financial services but expressed concern about some potential implications of financial agencies’ spotlight on climate change.

The bureau’s new director named former Obama administration officials Lorelei Salas and Eric Halperin, respectively, as the heads of supervision policy and enforcement.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council’s report on climate risk in the financial sector is a backdoor attempt to implement the Green New Deal, a Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee writes.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell called Sherrod Brown, the head of the Senate panel that oversees the central bank, this week to discuss Powell’s sweeping proposal to limit securities trading by senior Fed officials, as well as Brown’s new legislation on the subject.

Twenty-one centrist Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about the provision, which banks have fought to keep out of the social policy package. Meanwhile, the White House made no explicit mention of it in a draft summary of the bill.

A proposal that would enlist financial institutions’ help in raising tax revenue to pay for President Biden’s social policy agenda lost steam after objections from a key senator. The administration was said to be narrowing the plan’s scope to preserve its chances.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a swing Democratic vote in deliberations over President Biden's social spending bill, signaled opposition to requiring financial institutions to report customer account information to help catch tax evaders. The measure "is going to be gone," he predicted.

The upstate New York company, which has agreed to acquire People’s United Financial in Connecticut, is the latest bank to negotiate a multibillion-dollar spending commitment with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

In their first direct appeal to President Biden, financial institutions and other industries' trade lobbies called on the administration to abandon its proposal that would give the Internal Revenue Service new information on customer accounts.