SIFIs

The Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., convened a hearing where he and others criticized the Financial Stability Board for its lack of accountability and influence on U.S. regulators.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is calling for breaking up the biggest U.S. banks, revamping the Federal Reserve and pursuing criminal cases against financial institutions that have broken the law.

As Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew defended the legacy of the 2010 reform law, in another part of the capital a banker and Republican lawmakers pleaded for legislative changes.

MetLife and its allies are pushing back against the Financial Stability Oversight Council. But it's well worth imposing additional regulatory costs on large nonbanks if doing so helps prevent another crisis.

Twelve of the largest financial firms provided more information than they did last year in the public versions of their plans for breaking themselves up in a financial catastrophe, but whether they have done enough to reassure regulators won't be known for months.

MetLife is asking a federal court to force the Financial Stability Oversight Council to hand over documents that the agency says are protected by confidentiality agreements, saying those agreements cannot shield discovery if they are the basis of a systemic designation.

Just as U.S. regulators shy from labeling individual asset management firms as systemic, an international group of securities regulators is similarly abandoning a firm-by-firm approach.

Nearly five years after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, regulators are beginning to question whether the cumulative effect of the rules authorized by the law are hurting market liquidity — and if that could pose a systemic risk.

Banks may be using credit default swaps to circumvent capital rules, potentially shuttling risk away from the regulated sector in ways that may pose systemic risk, according to a paper issued Thursday by the Office of Financial Research.

Several weighty issues remain on the agenda for policymakers over the next few months, including everything from living wills to regulatory relief to a long-lost compensation rule.

MetLife Chief Financial Officer John Hele said financial watchdogs failed to define what they mean by “systemic” before working on new rules for companies that are designated a risk to the financial system.

The "too big to fail" problem can't be solved with living wills and orderly liquidation. Rather, a structural solution is needed to reduce the size of mega-institutions.

As the first legal briefs are filed in MetLife's challenge to FSOC's decision to designate the life insurance giant as systemically risky, the interagency council and outsiders are pointing to the high bar the company has to clear to convince the court to overturn the decision.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including a call for a small-business loan brokers' code of ethics and why Congress needs to level the playing field for investors in bank obligations.

By ensuring that all big-bank investors receive equal treatment in bankruptcy and looking for other ways to prevent short-term liquidity problems from becoming major financial crises, Congress can avoid the need to test the FDIC’s ability to resolve large financial institutions.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the merits and drawbacks of Sen. Richard Shelby's regulatory reform legislation, whether bigger banks are inherently riskier and banks' evolving interest in blockchain technology.

The Senate Banking Committee approved a broad regulatory reform bill Thursday on party lines, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle vowing to continue negotiations this summer.

Critics of the regulatory relief bill proposed by Sen. Richard Shelby argue that will endanger the financial system and benefit big banks. But in fact, the changes offer sensible, nonpartisan fixes to some of the biggest problems with the Dodd-Frank Act.

It's a good idea to raise the asset threshold at which financial institutions are automatically designated as systemically important financial institutions. But Sen. Richard Shelby's proposed legislation for regulatory relief does require one crucial change.

No bank has fully disclosed what it spends on the Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, in part because the figure is hard to isolate. It's a key piece of information missing in the debate over banks' regulatory burden.