Financial Regulation

President-Elect Joe Biden’s choice to name Janet Yellen as his Treasury Secretary represents a tremendous opportunity to take executive action on the issues most pressing to all Americans. Here are just some meaningful actions the next Treasury Secretary could take without having to go through Congress.

Janet Yellen has had a long and distinguished career in the academy and in public service. Like anyone with such a lengthy career, there have been misses along the way. And RDP and other progressives will be sure to speak out in the future should any of them resurface. But Yellen’s commitment to fighting unemployment and the conventional wisdom has been the through line of her career. The differences between the worldviews of Janet Yellen and Tim Geithner, President Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, could hardly be more stark.

The Democratic base, still scarred from the 2016 election, is frantic not to count its chickens before they hatch. But Wall Street and corporate America have no such qualms. As Joe Biden leads in national polls and swing states, the most powerful firms in the country are seeking assurances that his administration won’t crack down on their crimes.

It might be a shock to hear that government is “not good” at financial deregulation, given how it’s seemingly the one thing that’s popular on both sides of the aisle. But Mulvaney’s complaint is instructive; he’s frustrated that the civil servants who actually make the executive branch run happen to care about doing their jobs properly.

As numerous civil rights and racial justice organizations have highlighted, changes to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) regulations on digital activities are likely to have far-reaching consequences as it regards economic and racial equity. Specifically, these changes risk leading to disparate impact, “digital redlining, “predatory inclusion,” and enhanced surveillance. Given the seriousness of this rulemaking’s potential consequences, the OCC should do all that it can to ensure that the public has the utmost confidence in the integrity of the rulemaking process. Sadly, in allowing that process to move forward under the leadership of an acting official with severe conflicts of interest, the Office is rendering public trust in it impossible.

Last month, Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting, announced that he would be stepping down from his post effective May 29. The former First Deputy Comptroller of the Currency, Brian Brooks, has taken his place in an acting capacity. Although he is now one of the country’s top banking regulators, Brooks – who only joined the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – remains a relatively unknown figure. Here is what we know (and more troublingly, what we don’t know) about the new acting Comptroller.

This crisis has shattered any illusions that our post-financial crisis framework is resilient enough to withstand the challenges of the future. Coronavirus has, in particular, uncovered one of our most fundamental, persistent weaknesses: our continued inability to anticipate and prepare for new financial risks. For this ill-preparedness, we have powerful actors like BlackRock, the asset management giant and political titan, to thank. In an effort to avoid more stringent regulation, BlackRock and others not only evaded scrutiny for their own contributions to systemic risk, but virtually destroyed the mechanisms designed to examine such risk across the wider economy.

The way our financial regulatory system is constructed means that true accountability for Wells Fargo cannot ultimately flow from the committee hall. Instead, it must come from the cabinet departments and federal agencies which hold the power to prosecute, fine, and regulate our big banks.