BANKING/DODD-FRANK/POLITICS: “On Halloween, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio huddled with fellow Democrats in his Senate offices to make an announcement: months of talks between Mr. Brown and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo to roll back post-financial crisis rules had ended in failure.
Unfazed, Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Donnelly of Indiana—all moderate Democrats—said they would press for their own agreement with Mr. Crapo. What followed were nearly two weeks of frenzied behind-the-scenes talks, according to people familiar with the deliberations, as lawmakers worked to cut a deal before they left town on Thanksgiving break…
The deal, announced Monday[11-13-17], marked the first significant bipartisan agreement to relieve small and regional lenders from a number of restrictions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law. A similar effort in the prior Congress, led by Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), the then-chairman of the banking panel, ended in a bill no Democrats backed, dooming its chances to advance through the Senate…
The deal includes provisions that could drastically cut the number of banks subject to heightened Federal Reserve oversight by raising a key regulatory threshold to $250 billion in assets from $50 billion. Lawmakers at one point considered raising the $50 billion asset threshold to as high as $350 billion, the people said, before eventually settling on $250 billion.
Though Republicans and some Democrats increasingly favor abandoning an arbitrary asset threshold in favor of giving the Fed more discretion to decide which banks to reel in for stricter oversight, Democrats involved in crafting the deal insisted on an explicit threshold, as a signal of where Congress thought the Fed should draw the line.”
-Andrew Ackerman, “Two Weeks of Frenzied Negotiations Led to Bank-Relief Deal,” The Wall Street Journal online, Nov. 17, 2017 05:30am