Politico does a piece on how President Biden has failed to move on having the Government increase bank regulation….
And?
He is up against a Republican US Senate wall that has the assistance of Democratic Senator Manchin….
They won’t approve key Biden job picks ….
Sooo?
The banks seem safe from the government looking deeper into their business….
And the Fed is busy working the inflation problem, while pandemic problems are still hanging around….
President Joe Biden pledged to bring financial oversight back in style after four years of rule rollbacks under Donald Trump. But more than a year into Biden’s first term, none of the government’s major bank regulators have Senate-confirmed leaders.
Sarah Bloom Raskin withdrew last week as Biden’s nominee for the top job overseeing banks at the Federal Reserve after facing opposition from Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Moderate Democrats earlier rejected Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick to head another bank regulator, because she had advocated for a dominant role for government in finance. The other key overseer, the FDIC, was just taken over by an Obama appointee on an acting basis — though his term technically expired three years ago.
The result is that regulators have done little to reverse what many Democrats saw as a weakening of the guardrails around banks during the Trump administration. Progressive priorities, like making it tougher for banks to merge or pressing financial institutions to prepare for climate change, are moving slowly. And there’s no point person on the Fed board during an especially risky moment for the financial system as banks deal with soaring inflation, rising interest rates and disruption caused by the war in Ukraine.
“This is a moment, similar to what was happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with tremendous technological shifts in the financial sector,” Omarova said in an interview, referring to the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. “At that time, a lot of what was happening was allowed to happen because there was not sufficiently attuned and careful oversight.”