The new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, John C. Williams, yesterday gave his backing to his predecessor's campaign to clean up bank culture, the New York Times reported. “I do commit to continue the New York Fed’s leadership on this in future years,” he said at a New York Fed conference on bank governance. More than four years ago, after a number of big scandals on Wall Street, William C. Dudley, who was until Sunday the president of the New York Fed, started the initiative to improve the culture at large financial institutions. Dudley succeeded in getting top bankers to participate in regular discussions about how they could overhaul the culture of their institutions, and in some cases, boards of major banks have started to focus on the issue of employee conduct. But some of his more ambitious ideas have not been taken up. Williams, previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, did not specify the policies that he might pursue to try to bring about a lasting improvement in bankers’ ethics. Instead, his main message yesterday was that bankers and regulators must be careful not to relax their efforts at a time when banks’ financial performance looks strong.
