On the recordMay 12, 2010
I commend my colleagues for their work on this amendment. But, as I have stated, I believe it will fuel, and not limit, the type of charter shopping in search of the most lax regulator that we have seen in this past crisis. The Hutchinson amendment would preserve the status quo by allowing the Federal Reserve to continue regulating about 845 State banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System out of a total of approximately 6,000 State banks. This is a tremendous shame. Over the last 2 years, I sat through 80 hearings, listening to witnesses discuss the failings of the Fed--the failure of the agency to write rules protecting consumers, the failure of the agency to regulate derivatives, and its failure to properly supervise holding companies. In response to these hearings, I initially introduced a bill that would have both streamlined our bank regulatory system and stopped banks from being able to engage in regulatory arbitrage. It would have consolidated the bank supervisory functions of four regulatory agencies--the OCC, the OTS, the FDIC, and the Fed--and would have created a single new agency to supervise banks. In other words, it would have taken the Fed out of the business of bank supervision entirely. I ended up modifying this proposal in response to concerns raised by my colleagues, but the bill that we passed out of committee still consolidates bank regulatory functions in a clear and logical way.
