The two Democratic Board members (Harper & Otsuka) were fired from the NCUA without cause.

There are thousands of credit unions around the country that provide banking services to millions of consumers throughout the country. Many of these customers are low-income and minority families and small businesses that would be forced to turn to high-cost, predatory, and discriminatory financial service providers if it were not for the credit union. Firing two of the three NCUA Board members limits the effectiveness of the agency that supervises credit unions and prevents it from doing vital work such as rulemaking.

Read Better Markets’ statement here.

The SEC extended the effective and compliance dates for rules requiring funds to more frequently report portfolio-related information to the SEC and the public.

The extension hurts the SEC’s and the public’s ability to have timely information about funds’ investments and to develop a timely and complete understanding of the market.

OCC combines its Midsize and Community Bank Supervision and Large Bank Supervision functions to create the Bank Supervision and Examination line of business.

The OCC says that the combination of supervisory functions will increase efficiency and allow for resource sharing. However, it will actually reduce the agency’s focus on large, systemically important bank supervision, which is vital for financial stability. Postmortem studies of Silicon Valley Bank’s failure and other failures in 2023 indicate that a shortage of examiners with the needed skills to supervise SVB when it became a large bank directly led to the failures. The OCC’s action to create more “generalist” examiners virtually ensures that this problem will persist.

Acting OCC Comptroller Hood outlined four strategic priorities for the OCC – including “embracing bank-fintech partnerships” and “expanding bank digital asset activities.”

Hood outlined four strategic priorities for the OCC:
1. Reducing regulatory burden,
2. Promoting financial inclusion,
3. Embracing bank-fintech partnerships, and
4. Expanding responsible bank activities involving digital assets.

These initiative—namely reducing regulatory protection, increasing bank-fintech partnerships, and increasing digital assets will introduce more risk into the banking system, endanger consumers, and make bank failures and bailouts more likely.

The CFPB issued an internal memo outlining a change of priorities within the agency, which details plans to reduce supervision and examination, shift focus from non-depository to depository institutions, cede supervision and enforcement responsibilities to state agencies, as well as scale back a number of other high-priority activities from the previous Administration.

New CFPB leadership teamed up with Wall Street to convince a federal court to eliminate the CFPB’s Credit Card Late Fees Rule, which would have saved Consumers billions of dollars per year by reducing the maximum cap on late fees from approximately $45 to $8.