The House will vote this fall on up to four tax bills, including one to extend tax cuts scheduled to lapse after 2025, said Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Wall Street Journal reported. Republicans will discuss their ideas in July and release an outline in early August, Brady said yesterday. The plan is to schedule the votes before the midterm elections, according to Brady. The bills follow last year’s revamp of the tax system and may address issues barely touched then, including retirement-savings policy, Brady said. The bills stand little chance of advancing through the Senate, where Democratic votes would be needed.
On the heels of a legislative victory this week for small and midsize banks, bigger banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are lobbying congressional Republicans in an effort to ensure a victory of their own, the Wall Street Journal reported. Large banks are pushing Congress to redefine swap transactions made between different affiliates of the same company so that they aren’t subject to certain rules stemming from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The move would prevent regulators from forcing banks to post collateral for those transactions, potentially saving banks hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs. Legislation that would legally change the definitions of those transactions — exempting them from Dodd-Frank collateral rules — has passed the House, but has died in the Senate due to Democratic opposition. Now, House Republicans have taken a harder-line approach to push the legislation through.
A decade after the global financial crisis tipped the United States into a recession, Congress agreed on yesterday to free thousands of small- and medium-sized banks from strict rules that had been enacted as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law to prevent another meltdown, the New York Times reported. In a rare demonstration of bipartisanship, the House voted 258-159 to approve a regulatory rollback that passed the Senate this year. The bill stops far short of unwinding the toughened regulatory regime put in place to prevent the nation’s biggest banks from engaging in risky behavior, but it represents a substantial watering down of Obama-era rules governing a large swath of the banking system. The legislation will leave fewer than 10 big banks in the U.S. subject to stricter federal oversight, freeing thousands of banks with less than $250 billion in assets from a post-crisis crackdown that they have long complained is too onerous.
The House is expected today to vote on Senate-approved legislation aimed at easing the post-crisis financial rulebook, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bill represents the most significant bipartisan effort to relieve small and regional lenders from a number of restrictions tied to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law. If it is passed as expected, President Donald Trump could sign the legislation into law as early as this week. GOP House leaders agreed to advance the bill only after Senate leaders promised to vote on a follow-up package of bills favored by the House — but not included in the Senate bill — aimed at making it easier for companies to raise cash. Read more. (Subscription required.)
In related news, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are considering whether to add a measure that would ease one of Wall Street’s most hated post-financial crisis rules to a must-pass spending bill, Bloomberg News reported. The move to change the Volcker Rule’s ban on proprietary trading may be included in next year’s budget for financial regulators. The measure, which passed the House earlier this year, would put one regulator in charge of the rule’s implementation, instead of five, potentially making it simpler for banks to comply with it and to lobby to alter it. Firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have been lobbying Congress to make such a change for years. The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services is to begin work on a budget for agencies, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on Thursday. Read more.
President Trump has repealed auto-lending guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), revoking a rule that was put in place to protect minority customers from predatory practices, The Hill reported. Trump’s signature on a congressional resolution erases the CFPB’s 2013 guidance targeting “dealer markups,” the additional interest that is added to a customer’s third-party auto loan as compensation for the dealer. Auto dealers, banks and their allies in Congress said that the CFPB policy was an unfair and unfounded attack on an essential and harmless financing tool. Republicans and a small group of Democrats voted to repeal the CFPB guidance under what is known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA). That law allows a simple majority of lawmakers in the House and Senate to vote to repeal a federal rule; it also bans the agency from replacing a rule with a similar measure in the future. The resolution cleared the House earlier this month after clearing the Senate in April.
