Fed proposes easing post-crisis rule on risky bank trading

The Federal Reserve is proposing to ease a rule aimed at defusing the kind of risk-taking on Wall Street that helped trigger the 2008 financial meltdown.

The Fed under new leadership on Wednesday unveiled proposed changes to the Volcker Rule, which bars banks' risky trading bets for their own profit with depositors' money. The changes would match the strictest applications of the rule to banks that do the most trading.

Fed officials say that would resolve some of the uncertainty for banks. It comes amid other government efforts to loosen financial regulations, as President Donald Trump has promised.

The Volcker Rule, crafted by regulators 4 ½ years ago, is a key plank of the landmark Dodd-Frank law intended to reduce the likelihood of another financial crisis and taxpayer-funded bank bailout. Trump has blamed Dodd-Frank for constraining economic growth.

The rule is named for Paul Volcker, a Fed chairman in the 1980s who was an adviser to President Barack Obama during the financial crisis. Volcker urged a ban on deposit-funded, high-risk trading by big banks, believing that it would be an effective in averting future economic crises.

There has already been a volley of modifications that unwind the stricter regulations put into place during the Great Recession:

—Last week, Congress approved legislation rolling back the Dodd-Frank law, giving Trump a key win on a campaign promise as he quickly signed it into law. The Republican-led legislation, passed with help from some opposition votes, was aimed at especially helping small and medium-sized banks, including community banks and credit unions. It eases oversight and capital requirements (and Volcker Rule compliance) for about two dozen banks falling below new capital thresholds, including BB&T Corp., SunTrust Banks, Fifth Third Bancorp and American Express.

—After Trump installed him in November as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney has shaped the watchdog agency established by the Dodd-Frank law and urged a curb on its powers. He has dropped a lawsuit against a payday lender, targeted agency enforcement powers in anti-discrimination cases and threatened a consumer complaint database. No banks or other financial institutions have been fined or sued since he took over.

The Volcker Rule banned high-risk activity known as proprietary trading. The practice had become a huge money-making machine for Wall Street mega-banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Proprietary trading allowed big banks to tap depositors' money in federally-insured bank accounts — essentially borrowing against that money and using it for investments.

"Weakening the Volcker Rule means allowing banks to play with other people's money again. That was the casino economy before the crisis," says Ed Mierzwinski, a senior director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy organization

In the years since the rule took effect, banks have been required to trade mainly on behalf of their clients.

"The proprietary trading desks are gone (from the banks) and they're probably not going to come back," says Oliver Ireland, an attorney specializing in banking law at Morrison & Foerster. Ireland was an associate general counsel at the Fed.

Still, big Wall Street banks have pushed against the Volcker Rule.

The Fed is an independent regulator that asserts its separation from political pressure and the White House. Trump, of course, has had the opportunity to put his stamp on the central bank by filling positions on the seven-member Fed board.

The new Fed chairman since February, Jerome Powell, who was a board member under ex-Fed chair Janet Yellen, was an investment banker before he joined the central bank. After Trump named him Fed chief, Powell told Congress that he believes the rules put into place after the 2008 crisis could be improved, though he doesn't completely support the administration's ambition of aggressively rolling back regulations.

Another Trump appointee on the Fed board, investment banker Randal Quarles, is the Fed's top overseer of Wall Street and the leader in seeking to ease financial regulation. He has said the package of rules under Dodd-Frank should be overhauled but not scrapped. The third sitting Fed governor is Lael Brainard, a former Treasury Department official appointed by Obama in 2014.

Trump has named three others to fill vacancies on the board: two economics professors and the Kansas banking commissioner. They await Senate confirmation.