ABA Banking Journal

The Treasury Department has eliminated or proposed to eliminate or modify a total of 305 regulations, according to a new report released today.

In a comment letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today -- the first of 12 the association will submit as part of the bureau’s ongoing public feedback initiative -- the American Bankers Association offered several commonsense recommendations for rebalancing the bureau’s civil investigative demand process.

By a margin of more than four to one, Americans agree that the House should pass S. 2155, the bipartisan Senate regulatory reform bill, according to results from a new ABA/Morning Consult poll released today during ABA's Government Relations Summit.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) today pledged that “we’re going to work hard to make sure [the S. 2155 regulatory reform measure] gets through” the House “as quickly as possible.”

As bankers prepared to head to Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers this morning, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the Democratic co-sponsors of S. 2155, charged them to urge the House to pass the regulatory reform measure immediately in its original form, warning that “this bill will not pass if it comes back to the Senate.”

ABA today commented on a joint proposed rulemaking issued by the OCC, Federal Reserve and FDIC, Farm Credit Administration and the Federal Housing Finance Administration that would align the agencies’ margin rules with restrictions on qualified financial contracts that took effect last year.

In Q&A during ABA’s Emerging Leaders Forum today, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) expressed his support for S. 2155 -- the bipartisan Senate regulatory reform bill currently awaiting action in the House -- calling it “a very sensible piece of legislation.”

More than 12,500 bankers will host financial education events across the country this week in celebration of Teach Children to Save Day today. Bankers will teach students the fundamentals of financial literacy, including the basics of saving, how to create a budget and how to distinguish wants from needs.

A federal judge’s recent action to vacate portions of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 order on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act has provided a new opportunity for the FCC to clarify certain definitions and take steps to ensure that consumers can continue to receive important communications from banks and other businesses, ABA and seven other financial trade groups said in a joint letter to Senate leaders.

Americans’ expectations for home price changes in 2018 remained on par with 2017’s figures, according to results from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s 2018 SCE Housing Survey, an annual companion to the Survey of Consumer Expectations.