Revamp approved in win for Wall Street

• Wall Street watchdogs hand- picked by President Donald Trump eased the Volcker Rule’s controversial ban on banks making speculative investments, wrapping up a top priority that’s long been sought by the financial industry.

The changes, approved Tuesday by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., seek to provide lenders a much clearer picture of which trades are prohibited, giving them confidence to engage in transactions without fear of violating Volcker.

But one Democratic FDIC board member warned the rollback could endanger the financial system by allowing lenders to recklessly trade hundreds of billions of assets like they did before the 2008 financial crisis.

The Volcker rewrite marks a victory for Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which has lobbied aggressively to weaken the rule for years. But the changes leave in place the rule’s prohibition on proprietary trading — the practice of banks making market bets with their own money. And lenders still face restrictions on investing in private equity and hedge funds.

“One of the post-crisis reforms that has been most challenging to implement for regulators and industry is the Volcker Rule,” Jelena Mcwilliams, who leads the FDIC, said.

A response to the 2008 meltdown, Volcker was meant to address concerns that some bank trading desks had behaved like hedge funds, using their firms’ balance sheets to finance risky wagers. The six biggest lenders racked up almost US$16 billion losses from their prop- trading units over five quarters during the crisis, leading in part to the huge taxpayer bailouts that stoked public anger as consumers suffered through a recession.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the rule’s key advocate, said such trading could sink banks and threaten the broader economy. It was included in the 2010 Dodd- Frank Act, with regulators putting it in place three years later.

Almost since the ink was dry, banks have complained that Volcker was exceedingly complex, making the rule difficult to comply with. So regulators picked by Trump arrived at their agencies with a strong interest in simplifying the rule. The revamp, known as Volcker 2.0, is part of a steady effort to soften regulations during his administration.

What authorities came up with on Volcker relies on what’s known as the market- risk prong to determine which transactions are prohibited for banks with more than US$1 billion of trading activity.

Under the rule, chief executive officers of banks with more than US$ 20 billion in trading activity will be required to attest to their firms’ compliance. The changes take effect Jan. 1, 2020, but banks will have another year to comply.