    [Senate Hearing 115-106]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 115-106

     FOSTERING ECONOMIC GROWTH: MIDSIZED, REGIONAL, AND LARGE INSTITUTION
                                  PERSPECTIVE

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                       BANKING,HOUSING,AND URBAN AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                         ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                       ON

         EXAMINING THE CURRENT STATE OF MIDSIZED, REGIONAL, AND LARGE
       INSTITUTIONS, INCLUDING THEIR REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS, IMPACT ON
              CLIENTS, AND THEIR ROLE IN PROMOTING ECONOMIC GROWTH

                                   __________

                                 JUNE 15, 2017

                                   __________

      Printed for the use of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban
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                COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN AFFAIRS

                          MIKE CRAPO, Idaho, Chairman

    RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama           SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
    BOB CORKER, Tennessee                JACK REED, Rhode Island
    PATRICK J. TOOMEY, Pennsylvania      ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
    DEAN HELLER, Nevada                  JON TESTER, Montana
    TIM SCOTT, South Carolina            MARK R. WARNER, Virginia
    BEN SASSE, Nebraska                  ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts
    TOM COTTON, Arkansas                 HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
    MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota            JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
    DAVID PERDUE, Georgia                BRIAN SCHATZ, Hawaii
    THOM TILLIS, North Carolina          CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
    JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana              CATHERINE CORTEZ MASTO, Nevada

                         Gregg Richard, Staff Director

                     Mark Powden, Democratic Staff Director

                          Elad Roisman, Chief Counsel

                          Jared Sawyer, Senior Counsel

                          Travis Hill, Senior Counsel

                    Graham Steele, Democratic Chief Counsel

                Laura Swanson, Democratic Deputy Staff Director

                     Elisha Tuku, Democratic Senior Counsel

                           Dawn Ratliff, Chief Clerk

                         Cameron Ricker, Hearing Clerk

                          Shelvin Simmons, IT Director

                              Jim Crowell, Editor

                                      (ii)

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------

                            THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2017

                                                                       Page

    Opening statement of Chairman Crapo..............................     1

    Opening statements, comments, or prepared statements of:
        Senator Brown................................................     2

                                   WITNESSES

    Harris H. Simmons, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Zions
      Bancorporation, on behalf of the Regional Bank Coalition.......     4
        Prepared statement...........................................    27
    Greg Baer, President, The Clearing House Association.............     6
        Prepared statement...........................................    32
    Robert R. Hill, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, South State
      Corporation, on behalf of Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America...     7
        Prepared statement...........................................    51
        Responses to written questions of:
            Senator Brown............................................    96
            Senator Sasse............................................    99
            Senator Tillis...........................................   100
    Saule T. Omarova, Professor of Law, Cornell University...........     9
        Prepared statement...........................................    52
        Responses to written questions of:
            Senator Brown............................................   102
            Senator Sasse............................................   104
            Senator Reed.............................................   108

                  Additional Material Supplied for the Record

    Statement submitted by the Independent Community Bankers of
      America........................................................   111
    Statement submitted by the American Bankers Association..........   116
    Statement submitted by Fifth Third Bank..........................   123
    Statement submitted by the Institute of International Bankers....   127
    Statement submitted by Texas Capital Bank........................   130
    GSIB scores......................................................   133

                                     (iii)

     FOSTERING ECONOMIC GROWTH: MIDSIZED, REGIONAL, AND LARGE INSTITUTION
                                  PERSPECTIVE

                                  ----------

                            THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2017

                                           U.S. Senate,
              Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Committee met at 9:49 a.m., in room SD-538, Dirksen
    Senate Office Building, Hon. Mike Crapo, Chairman of the
    Committee, presiding.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN MIKE CRAPO

        Chairman Crapo. This hearing will come to order.
        Last week, we received testimony on the role financial
    institutions play in fostering economic growth in local
    communities. The hearing focused on community lenders, and we
    heard about the need for additional tailoring, the increasing
    cost of compliance, and common-sense reforms to rules such as
    QM, TRID, HMDA, and Volcker.
        Today we will hear about the regulatory framework that
    midsize banks, regional banks, and larger financial
    institutions face. Midsize and regional banks are often
    subjected to costly post-crisis rules designed for the most
    systemically important banks. Many of these rules are applied
    based on asset thresholds that do not reflect the underlying
    systemic risk of financial institutions.
        While the size of a bank is one factor in measuring
    systemic importance, there are many other aspects of an
    institution that are relevant to how difficult the company
    would be to resolve and how consequential its distress or
    failure would be to financial markets.
        The result is a regulatory regime that is insufficiently
    tailored for many of the firms subject to it, for example,
    stress testing. Former Fed Governor Tarullo is among those who
    have stated that the $10 billion threshold for company-run
    stress tests is too low. Additionally, CCAR is a very costly,
    time-consuming process that is overly burdensome, especially
    for noncomplex regional banks. Another example is the Volcker
    rule, which has proven far too complicated to implement and
    incredibly difficult to comply with.
        One of my key priorities this Congress is passing
    legislation on a bipartisan basis to improve the bank
    regulatory framework and stimulate economic growth. In March,
    Senator Brown and I began our process to receive and consider
    proposals to help foster economic growth, and I appreciate all
    the valuable insights and recommendations that we have
    received. Also in March, the Federal banking agencies issued
    their EGRPRA report to Congress with their recommendations.
        And earlier this week, the Treasury Department issued the
    first of its reports examining how best to improve our
    regulatory framework. The report focused on banks and credit
    unions and provided a substantial number of helpful regulatory
    and legislative suggestions corresponding to the President's
    Executive Order on ``Core Principles for Regulating the
    Financial System''.
        I commend Secretary Mnuchin and his staff at Treasury for
    all the work that went into this report and for the thoughtful
    recommendations they have provided.
        I am particularly encouraged by a number of specific
    recommendations for midsize and regional banks, including
    changing the $50 billion SIFI threshold; exempting midsize
    banks from company-run stress tests; exempting banks without
    significant trading activity from the proprietary trading
    prohibition of the Volcker rule; and improving the transparency
    and process of CCAR and living wills.
        With the hundreds of recommendations that we have received
    through our economic growth submission process, the testimony
    we are receiving at these hearings, the EGRPRA report, and this
    Treasury report, the Committee has no shortage of ideas to
    consider as we work to improve our regulatory framework.
        As this process continues, I look forward to working with
    all Members of the Committee from both sides of the aisle to
    bring strong, robust bipartisan legislation forward.
        Senator Brown.

                   STATEMENT OF SENATOR SHERROD BROWN

        Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for holding
    today's hearing. Thank you to the four witnesses for joining us
    today.
        Based on the current Wall Street reform debate, the
    activity in the House and the report put out by Treasury
    earlier this week, I am concerned that some seem to have
    forgotten that we even had a financial crisis a decade ago. I
    can assure you that families in my home State still remember
    and continue to live with the consequences of the crisis. I
    have told this Committee before, but my Zip code in Cleveland
    where my wife and I live, 44105, in the year 2007, the first
    half of that year, had more foreclosures than any Zip code in
    the United States, and I see what a foreclosure on a home means
    to my neighbors.
        That crisis of a decade ago, when the unemployment rate for
    our Nation reached more than 10.5 percent, we had 14
    consecutive years of increasing foreclosures, some 400,000
    homes lost in 5 years at the height of the housing crisis in my
    State. That is to say nothing of the psychological damage
    caused by lost jobs and children being forced to move away from
    their friends and families.
        Just one example, 17 percent of Ohio homeowners still owe
    more on their mortgages than their home is worth--the second
    highest rate in the Nation behind the States of two Members of
    this Committee, Senator Cortez Masto and Senator Heller.
        With these experiences fresh in our mind, Congress passed
    Wall Street reform, including some of the most sweeping changes
    to financial regulation in 70 years. Wall Street and its allies
    are attacking rules like living wills and orderly liquidation
    that are meant to ensure that a $1 trillion megabank can fail
    without bringing down the economy with it. At the same time,
    they attack the capital rules that are meant to reduce the
    likelihood that banks will fail in the first place.
        Let me be clear. Proposals to weaken oversight of the
    biggest banks have no place in this Committee's process. Wall
    Street banks caused a financial crisis that cost our economy up
    to $14 trillion and took $160 billion in taxpayer bailouts.
    They made the market for the late and unlamented predatory
    lenders that have left more than one-fifth of Cleveland
    homeowners still underwater. One-fifth. Letting them run wild
    again will not help economic growth. It will just put our
    economy at risk once again.
        Having said that, I am optimistic there is room for
    agreement on a modified regime for overseeing regional banks.
    This will be the fifth hearing dedicated to the issue of these
    enhanced prudential standards since July of 2014. The last 3
    years, I have been encouraged by steps that the agencies have
    taken to better tailor standards like stress tests and living
    wills. We have heard that these two rules plus liquidity
    requirements may impose the most burdens with the least amount
    of benefits to financial stability when they are applied to
    regional banks. I think we all understand that.
        We have heard from both midsize banks and their regulators,
    as the Chairman cited, that changes should be considered to the
    Dodd-Frank-required stress tests. I look forward to working
    with the Chairman and our colleagues to explore what might make
    the oversight regime work better for both midsize and regional
    banks as long as financial stability and safety and soundness
    and consumer protections are not compromised.
        Let me close with a different topic, if I could, Mr.
    Chairman, in the last couple of minutes. Wall Street reforms'
    opponents accuse the law of being too partisan despite the fact
    that it received Republican votes in both the House and Senate
    and that it included 15 Republican-sponsored floor amendments.
    They say it was not well conceived even though we held more
    than 30 Committee hearings and Chairman Dodd spent months
    discussing the bill with Republicans on this Committee, some of
    them still on this Committee. The bill spent more than a month
    on the Senate floor.
        Contrast that, Mr. Chairman, and I want to point out that
    right now a small group of Republican Senators--maybe a dozen,
    we read; we do not really know--is crafting a health care bill
    behind closed doors. They are doing it with no participation
    from Democrats. As the case with Dodd-Frank, contrast how
    Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act a number of years ago.
    It took more than a year, dozens and dozens of hearings in my
    Committee alone, then the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension
    Committee. We accepted 150 Republican amendments, open process,
    lots of debate. But look at what has happened now with the
    Affordable Care Act.
        The Chairman of the Finance Committee--Senator Crapo and I
    both sit on that Committee, as does Senator Scott. That
    Committee has no plans to hold even a single hearing on the
    bill. Both Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act were the
    product of painstaking legislative work. We were doing our job
    bipartisanly. We put those together. It put money back in the
    pockets of American families through lower health care costs
    and lower credit card and mortgage fees. We owe it to these
    families on that issue and other issues to have an open and
    honest debate about the Republican health care bill. There is
    no sign that Senator McConnell is going to do that. No sign at
    all.
        Nothing could be more important to economic growth than
    safeguarding the health and the financial well-being of working
    families. This Committee can play a role in that. I am hopeful
    that we will.
        Thank you.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you.
        At this point we will move to the testimony of our
    witnesses. Before we do so, however, I want to alert both the
    witnesses and the Members that we have three votes scheduled at
    11 o'clock, so we are going to need to wrap this hearing up by
    11 o'clock, which means to my colleagues the 5-minute rule
    really must be honored, and I will honor it strictly with you.
    And to our witnesses, sometimes a question comes in right in
    the last few seconds of the 5 minutes. Please keep your answers
    brief to that so we can move on and let every Senator have an
    opportunity to ask questions.
        As each of you know, you have been allocated 5 minutes for
    your oral remarks, and we welcome them. You will also have
    plenty of opportunities to enhance your testimony in response
    to questions.
        Finally, I wanted to indicate to everyone, I have to
    testify in the Judiciary Committee in just a few minutes, so I
    will step out. But I will be back, and I look forward to
    reviewing and listening to all of your comments.
        With that, first we will receive testimony from Mr. Harris
    Simmons, chief executive officer and chairman of Zions
    Bancorporation, on behalf of the Regional Bank Coalition.
        Following him we will hear from Mr. Greg Baer, president of
    The Clearing House Association.
        Then we will hear from Mr. Robert Hill, chief executive
    officer of South State Corporation, on behalf of Mid-Size Bank
    Coalition of America.
        And, finally, we will hear from Ms. Saule Omarova--did I
    get that right?
        Ms. Omarova. Yes, you did.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you. Professor of law at Cornell
    University.
        Mr. Simmons, you may proceed.

     STATEMENT OF HARRIS H. SIMMONS, CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
     OFFICER, ZIONS BANCORPORATION, ON BEHALF OF THE REGIONAL BANK
                               COALITION

        Mr. Simmons. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
    appreciate the opportunity to present some views to the
    Committee this morning. I am Harris Simmons. I am the chairman
    and CEO of Zions Bancorporation. We are a $65 billion in assets
    regional bank headquartered in Salt Lake City. We operate
    across the Western United States, including in the Chairman's
    home State of Idaho. We particularly focus on small, medium,
    and mid-market kinds of businesses. We do a lot of commercial
    lending, the kind of lending that we believe creates a lot of
    jobs and supports a great deal of economic activity in the
    Western United States. We serve these businesses, their
    employees, their owners, and a number of municipalities across
    the West, many in rural locations, particularly in the
    Intermountain West.
        For the past several years, Zions Bancorporation has been
    the smallest of the systemically important financial
    institutions as defined by the Dodd-Frank Act. Sometimes we
    joke about ourselves as being an ``itty-bitty SIFI.'' And we
    have felt, I think, perhaps disproportionately, the brunt of
    the burden of complying with the enhanced prudential standards
    and other requirements of Dodd-Frank that are applicable to the
    SIFI group. But that is the common lot of the regional banks
    generally.
        It has forced us to hold capital that is at the north end
    of our peer group. It has retarded our growth and has hampered
    the ability of relationship managers, those on the front lines,
    to serve customers in the manner that they used to be able to
    do.
        In particular, the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and
    Review process, or CCAR as it is known, has been costly, it has
    been frustrating, and perhaps most of all, it has been
    incredibly opaque, and challenging to understand what the
    evolving requirements have been and what kind of standard is
    required of us as we think about the economics of our own
    business. It creates uncertainty, which in turn stifles
    planning and prudent risk taking.
        The liquidity coverage ratio is another feature that is
    applicable to the SIFI group. In the case of banks under $250
    billion but over $50 billion in size, a modified liquidity
    coverage ratio will become a constraint. I think it has not
    been particularly constraining. Over the past few years, the
    industry has been awash in liquidity. But it will become a
    constraint, and it will become a constraint at the worst
    possible time. And at a time when liquidity is at a premium, we
    will find ourselves as an industry withdrawing, and that will
    not be good for the economy.
        Finally, the banking regulatory apparatus has become a Rube
    Goldberg contraption with overlapping regulators, redundant
    regulations, such as the various capital regimes, scores of
    compliance trip wires that cumulatively are overly expensive,
    sometimes conflicting in their objectives, and they consume an
    enormous amount of management and board time and resources.
        They also have produced a lot of growth in the shadow
    banking system outside of the regulated banking system. They
    have, I believe, slowed the housing recovery and resulted in
    slower capital formation and small business credit
    availability.
        The Treasury Department's outline for reform provides, I
    think, a great blueprint for beginning to tackle many of these
    issues, and we look forward to working with other financial
    institutions and with members of Congress and Members of this
    Committee in trying to come with solutions that will leave the
    industry safer and sounder but that will foster economic
    growth.
        Thank you very much.
        Senator Scott [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Simmons.
        Mr. Baer, you may proceed.

         STATEMENT OF GREG BAER, PRESIDENT, THE CLEARING HOUSE
                              ASSOCIATION

        Mr. Baer. Thank you, Senator Scott, Ranking Member Brown. I
    am pleased to appear before the Committee today to discuss how
    regulatory reform could stimulate economic growth.
        I should emphasize at the outset that if the goal is
    economic growth, it cannot be achieved while excluding large
    and regional banks from that effort. Community bank relief is
    warranted, but as the Treasury Department noted in its report
    this week, community banks hold only 13 percent of U.S. banking
    assets. The 25 banks that own The Clearing House fund more than
    40 percent of the Nation's business loans held by banks and
    more than 75 percent of loans to households. Large banks
    originated 54 percent of small business loans in 2015 by dollar
    amount and about 86 percent by number.
        The starting point for any review of the American banking
    system is one that is extremely resilient. Regulatory changes
    have helped to increase the quality and quantity of capital.
    Post-crisis, the aggregate Tier 1 common equity ratio for The
    Clearing House's 25 banks has nearly tripled and increased from
    $331 billion to over $1 trillion in capital.
        Similarly, U.S. banks now hold unprecedented amounts of
    cash and cash equivalents to protect against a run. Today such
    assets compose nearly a quarter of U.S. large bank balance
    sheets.
        While much has been gained in fortifying the Nation's
    largest banks, some overly stringent capital liquidity, and
    other rules have diminished their ability to lend and
    intermediate in financial markets. For example, Fed data show
    that approval rates for small businesses were just 45 percent
    at large banks subject to heightened capital requirements for
    such loans, but 77 and 60 percent, respectively, at CDFIs and
    small banks.
        Similarly, with respect to mortgage lending, our research
    demonstrates that the Federal Reserve CCAR test is imposing
    dramatically higher capital requirements on residential
    mortgage loans than bank internal stress test models or the
    standardized approach to capital developed by the Basel
    Committee. As a result, over the past 6 years, residential real
    estate loans declined 0.5 percent per year at banks subject to
    the CCAR stress test while they have risen 4.0 percent at banks
    not subject to the test.
        Capital markets have also been affected. Indeed, post-
    crisis regulation by banking regulators has affected securities
    markets more than regulation by securities regulators. Bank
    regulations have made it significantly more expensive for
    broker-dealers affiliated with banks, which now include all the
    largest broker-dealers, to hold, fund, and hedge securities
    positions. And the Volcker rulemakes the holding of market-
    making inventory a potential legal violation.
        The greatest impact has been felt by smaller companies.
    Issuance of corporate bonds by small and midsize firms has
    fallen over the past few years even as issuance by larger firms
    has increased.
        Supervision is also playing as large a role as regulation
    in constraining credit as examiners increasingly dictate how
    bank resources are to be allocated. For example, leveraged
    lending is an important type of financing for growing
    companies, which carry a lot of debt. Based on no empirical
    evidence, the Federal banking agencies have issued guidance
    setting arbitrary limits on such lending. Some of the guidance
    makes little sense. For example, regulators require banks, in
    evaluating whether a company is leveraged, to assume that all
    its lines of credit are drawn, which is akin to lowering a
    consumer's credit score because their credit line has been
    increased for good payment history. As a result, some Fortune
    500 companies with investment grade debt are now deemed by the
    regulators to be highly leveraged and, therefore, risky.
        More broadly, we believe that bank supervision has lost its
    way post-crisis and requires a comprehensive reexamination.
    Even as banks have dramatically improved their financial
    condition, supervisors have transformed supervisory grades from
    a measurement of financial condition to a measurement of
    compliance. They have created unwritten rules that lead
    isolated compliance problems serving as a barrier to expansion,
    in some cases for years, and particularly for midsize and
    regional banks.
        Another result is simply a massive cost, which must be
    passed along to consumers, as described in a recent CEO letter
    to shareholders: ``At M&T, our own estimated cost of complying
    with regulation has increased from $90 million in 2010 to $440
    million in 2016, representing nearly 15 percent of our total
    operating expenses. During 2016 alone, M&T faced 27 different
    examinations from six regulatory agencies. Examinations were
    ongoing during 50 of the 52 weeks of the year.''
        Much of this burden comes as rules that make sense for
    large complex firms are applied to firms that present few of
    the same risks. Certainly the answer to a bad rule is not to
    apply it to fewer people, and there are many rules that fit
    that description. But there are other rules that make sense for
    some but not all. My written testimony sets forth numerous
    rules in both categories and ideas for how they could be
    reformed.
        There is no need for fundamental changes to post-crisis
    regulation, but there is certainly room for improvement, and
    particularly if the goal is stronger economic growth.
        Thank you.
        Senator Scott. Thank you, Mr. Baer.
        Now, from the great State of South Carolina, Mr. Hill.

      STATEMENT OF ROBERT R. HILL, JR., CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER,
     SOUTH STATE CORPORATION, ON BEHALF OF MID-SIZE BANK COALITION
                               OF AMERICA

        Mr. Hill. Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, Senator
    Scott, and Members of the Committee, I am Robert Hill, CEO of
    South State Corporation. I am grateful that your leadership has
    provided a nonpartisan platform to hear from bankers like
    myself.
        Today I represent my company, South State Bank, and also
    the Mid-Size Bank Coalition, which is the voice of 78 midsize
    banks in the U.S. with headquarters in 29 States. Our member
    banks are primarily between $10 billion and $50 billion in
    assets and serve customers and communities through more than
    10,000 branches in all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and
    three U.S. territories. Midsize banks most often are the
    largest local bank serving their community, many for more than
    a century.
        South State specifically was founded in 1933 on the heels
    of the Great Depression in rural South Carolina. Today we serve
    communities both large and small in North Carolina, South
    Carolina, and in Georgia.
        In January of this year, our bank crossed the $10 billion
    in asset threshold, and I have had the opportunity to see
    firsthand how this threshold is having a negative impact on
    economic growth.
        At South State, not unlike my peers in the coalition, we
    operate a very simple business model. We offer depository
    services, and we lend money in local communities. This is very
    similar to the business model we operated when we were a very
    small community bank. We have stable deposit funding from our
    customers, revenues that are driven from traditional banking
    services, and that are well understood by both our regulators
    and our management team. And we have never done any proprietary
    trading.
        South State and other midsize banks have prudent business
    models that contribute to economic growth and support financial
    stability. Our company never lost money during the financial
    crisis. We never did subprime lending. We never stopped lending
    to our customers during the crisis.
        As the largest banks in many of our States, midsize banks
    can have a significant impact on our communities, but some
    banks are choosing not to cross this huge threshold or cross it
    and shift their focus from investing in the businesses that
    they have to investing in the preparation for large bank
    regulation.
        Under Dodd-Frank, crossing the $10 billion in asset
    threshold has had very harsh implications for midsize banks.
    This is happening to a segment of our industry not based on
    risk but based purely on asset size. And I assure you that
    adding $1 in incremental assets as we cross $10 billion did
    little to change the risk profile of our company.
        While we value many parts of Dodd-Frank and we like the way
    our industry has been strengthened since the crisis, I have yet
    to see the value to the public in any appreciable way of the
    arbitrary $10 billion threshold. These requirements drain
    resources of midsize banks, divert dollars from investment in
    our customers to investment in large bank regulation. For
    example, South State was impacted by over $20 million per year,
    a significant sum for a bank our size. What impacts did this
    have on our local communities? For us, that equates to 300
    jobs. Approximately 10 percent of our branches were closed, and
    even more jobs were diverted from lending to regulatory
    compliance.
        As banks that support Main Street and not Wall Street, we
    need our communities and our communities deserve regulation
    that encourages prudent behavior and also protects our
    customer. But we also need to have common-sense regulation that
    does not impose burdens or slow economic growth in our
    communities. In our view, we must move away from the Dodd-Frank
    $10 billion regulatory threshold.
        Again, I appreciate the opportunity the Committee has given
    the Mid-Size Bank Coalition and myself to express these views
    today.
        Senator Scott. Thank you, Mr. Hill.
        Professor Omarova.

       STATEMENT OF SAULE T. OMAROVA, PROFESSOR OF LAW, CORNELL
                               UNIVERSITY

        Ms. Omarova. Senators, thank you for the opportunity to
    testify on this important issue.
        We are all here today because 9 years after the worst
    financial crisis in generations, the banking industry is now
    waging a massive campaign to roll back the Dodd-Frank Act and
    the entire regime of post-crisis systemic risk regulation. The
    banks claim that regulation is what directly prevents them from
    lending to small businesses and struggling families and, thus,
    prevents them from fostering America's economic growth. You
    should take these claims with extreme skepticism.
        First, it is important to understand what the banking
    industry really means by growth. What America needs is real
    economic growth--sustainable, socially inclusive, long-term
    growth of the real, nonfinancial, sector of the American
    economy. We need to restore the Nation's eroding industrial
    base, rebuild and modernize our infrastructure, and create
    sustainable, well-paying jobs. What we do not need is to have
    another stock market or real estate bubble fed by cheap credit
    and speculation in secondary markets.
        Yet if Congress, you, deregulate big banks, that is
    precisely what will grow. Big Wall Street banks derive the bulk
    of their profits not from small business lending but from
    massive high-risk trading and dealing in secondary markets.
    They feed speculation, not real economic growth. That
    speculation is precisely what caused the latest financial
    crisis, and it will inevitably cause another one on your watch.
        In a strategically savvy move, big banks are aligning
    themselves with the smaller and midsized and regional banks as
    far more sympathetic petitioners, almost the Jimmy Stewart bank
    types. Almost but not quite. Even the tiniest among them have
    more than $10 billion in assets, and the bigger ones, well over
    $300 and sometimes $400 billion in assets. True, they are
    smaller and less dependent on speculative trading than Wall
    Street megabanks, and perhaps they do deserve a lighter
    regulatory load. But if trying to help these smaller banks you
    grant their request for a massive regulatory rollback, the
    principal beneficiaries of the deregulation will be Wall Street
    megabanks. Deregulation will reduce smaller banks' compliance
    costs, but it will also enable megabanks to expand the high-
    risk speculative trading, which is at the core of financial
    instability and crisis.
        To guard against that, you should require banks to provide
    concrete evidence that they will actually use their savings
    from specific deregulatory measures primarily, if not
    exclusively, to increase lending to productive economic
    enterprise. At the very least, banks should give you the exact
    amounts of prudent, productive loans that they were ready to
    make but were forced to decline solely because they did not
    have enough money left after paying for regulatory compliance.
    I doubt that such evidence exists. Yet there is plenty of
    evidence that all banks, regardless of their size, generate
    healthy net profits, in fact, to the tune of $175 billion only
    in 2016 and choose to return the bulk of those profits to their
    shareholders through dividend payments and share buybacks. Only
    last year, insured banks paid out $103 billion in cash
    dividends, an amount second only to the record high of $110
    billion in bank dividends paid in 2007, the last pre-crisis
    bubble year.
        High dividends increase banks' stock price and management
    bonuses, so that is where most of their money seems to go, not
    to lending or regulatory compliance. That is a far cry from
    rebuilding America's industrial base or helping struggling
    American families to get out of poverty.
        Unless banks put their own money where their very loud and
    very well paid mouths are, you should not read their claims
    about fostering growth as anything more than convenient
    rhetoric. Indeed, it is much more likely that big banks'
    massive push for deregulation is driven by their desire to
    generate high speculative trading profits, increase their
    executives' bonuses, and return more dividend cash to their
    shareholders. Right now, all of these things are significantly
    limited by the Dodd-Frank regime of enhanced prudential
    supervision, including heightened capital ratios, supervisory
    stress testing, and living will requirements applicable to
    large systemically important financial institutions, or SIFIs.
        No wonder that the banking industry attacks the key
    elements of this post-crisis regulatory regime as supposedly
    arbitrary and insufficiently ``tailored'' to their unique
    circumstances. For example, banks are demanding that SIFI
    designation is conducted on a strict case-by-case basis with
    every bank getting the same tailored process as MetLife got,
    and we all know how perfectly efficient and problem-free that
    process turned out to be. If you allow this to happen, it will
    effectively kill the entire regime of enhanced SIFI oversight.
        The same goes for banks' demands to force the Federal
    Reserve to publish its stress test scenarios for public notice
    and comment and to restrict the Fed's ability to conduct and
    use its own test models. Yes, that will make stress tests fully
    transparent, just like giving the students exam questions
    before the exam will make that exam transparent. And it will
    also make it absolutely useless for its intended purposes. I
    know better than to give my students such a special gift, and
    you should know better than to do the same for the banks.
        In conclusion, I urge you to keep focus not on what banks
    want for the sake of their own profitability, but on what the
    American economy and the American people need: not another
    speculative frenzy but sustainable, employment-generating
    growth of the real economy. Financial deregulation will hinder,
    not foster, such growth.
        Thank you.
        Senator Scott. Thank you, Professor.
        And I will just remind all of us that we have votes at 11
    o'clock, and our goal is to be out by 11 a.m., so keeping our
    questions to 5 minutes would be very helpful. I will start off
    our questions.
        Mr. Hill, thank you for being here today. Certainly it is
    always good to have a homegrown South Carolina product like
    yourself and your company do very well, and thank you for being
    here to testify before us today.
        I think it is critical that the Committee hears from voices
    representing all parts of our country. It ensures we get a
    holistic perspective on how to grow our economy for everyone.
    That is why I am so glad that Mr. Hill is testifying today. His
    company, South State Bank, is the largest financial institution
    headquartered in South Carolina. It has less than $12 billion
    in assets, but States like mine rely heavily on midsize banks
    and regional banks to provide small business loans, mortgages,
    and consumer financial services.
        The Dodd-Frank Act created a lot of hoops for companies
    like South State to jump through. Much of the added regulatory
    burden is triggered by specific asset thresholds. It seems to
    me that if you tell someone that they will get hammered by the
    Federal Government if they hit XYZ number, everyone is going to
    do all that they can to avoid hitting that number. The
    collateral damage is to economic growth.
        Mr. Hill, can you speak to the distortions in the market
    and business behavior as institutions approach these
    thresholds?
        Mr. Hill. Yes, Senator Scott. First, I want to thank you
    for the nonpartisan support of the CLEAR Act, as well as
    Senators Heitkamp and Moran. It is this type of bipartisan
    sensible legislation that I do think is moving the ball forward
    to help deal with some of these issues.
        Senator Scott. Thank you.
        Mr. Hill. The changes as you approach this threshold is
    versus--I think of a threshold as a small step forward. This is
    a meaningful leap for a bank of $10 billion. I have been in the
    business for 30 years. I have dealt with a lot of regulation. I
    do not ever remember even fathoming the fact that a customer
    could add one more dollar to a checking account or savings
    account to take you to $10 billion and you would be saddled
    with a $20 million burden and be treated as a large bank.
        So it is doing two things. It is, one, driving banks out of
    our industry. Senator Perdue certainly sees it in his State.
    Senator Tillis, Senator Scott, we certainly see it in ours.
    They cannot compete, and as you get larger, they realize they
    do not want to go over that $10 billion hurdle and they elect
    to exit.
        The other is for those that elect to stay in like our
    company, we are an 80-plus-year-old company. We are vitally
    important to many of the communities we serve. We wanted to
    stay in. But try to take the Dodd-Frank Act and put it over a
    bank with a little bit more than 100 offices compared to a
    national bank with 5,000 or 6,000. The burden is huge. So it
    ends up resulting on different forms of behavior. Companies
    decide to sell, or they have to cut expenses. In our case, we
    closed 10 percent of our branches. All of that money went
    toward regulatory reform, and it has taken the attention of our
    board and our management team and a lot of our employees over 3
    years to be able to make this journey. And now we have just
    crossed it. Now we begin to be treated as a large company.
        Senator Scott. Thank you, Mr. Hill. Facts and figures
    aside, at the end of the day I am worried about the Aiken
    family that is trying to buy their first home or the Nichols
    small business owner who just survived the flood and is now
    trying to get back on their feet.
        Mr. Hill, what is the impact of enforcing these arbitrary
    thresholds on economic growth and on the people of South
    Carolina? Specifically, you mentioned--my words, not yours--
    $9.9 billion in assets versus $10 billion in assets, 10 percent
    closing of your locations, maybe up to $20 million of
    additional regulatory burden. How does that impact the average
    person in our State looking to borrow money for a home or
    restore their business after a major flood?
        Mr. Hill. Well, the midsize banks fill a very important gap
    between the smallest banks and the largest banks in our
    country. Because we are the community bank for South Carolina,
    we are very focused on communities like Aiken. Many of the
    large national banks would not know where that community would
    be. It does two things. One, it drives costs up. That is very
    simple, very clear. It is 15 to 20 percent. It takes
    flexibility away. It does not allow us to treat customers
    uniquely based on their needs, both financially and also their
    situation. And it paints in a one-size-fits-all regulatory
    environment.
        Senator Scott. Thank you, sir.
        Ranking Member Brown.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, Senator Scott.
        Professor Omarova, the Wall Street Journal recently said it
    is hard to miss how much the Treasury report would benefit top
    Wall Street banks. That comes from the paper of record, if you
    will, for Wall Street. By my count, the report includes about
    two dozen of The Clearing House's recommendations. You talked
    in your testimony, Professor Omarova, about the argument that
    rolling back rules for Wall Street banks would help lending.
    What are the implications of rolling back the capital and the
    leverage rules and the Volcker rule restrictions against
    proprietary trading? Would that, in fact, lead to more lending
    or economic growth?
        Ms. Omarova. Well, there is absolutely no evidence that it
    will, in fact, lead to more lending or economic growth. There
    is a lot of confusion about what capital rules do, because
    banks always tell us, oh, you know, capital just traps cash and
    we cannot lend money out. And nothing could be further from
    truth. Capital is not cash in the vault. It is not some kind of
    gold that, you know, they have to put away. Capital is just an
    accounting concept. It is basically shareholders' equity, and
    banks are forced by regulation to hold these cushions of
    shareholder equity to protect creditors from losses on their
    assets. They can get away with much thinner cushions than, you
    know, a normal company could get away with in the capitalist
    market because the Government protects creditors of the banks
    from banks' failure.
        And so if you roll back capital requirements, what will
    happen is that the banks will be able to take more risks. And
    because banks are privately owned, profit-seeking enterprises,
    quite legitimately they would look for investments in assets
    that generate higher returns, which typically entails higher
    risks. And that is what will happen. There is no evidence that
    somehow Dodd-Frank Act is what prevents banks from lending. You
    know, banks choose how to use their cash, and they choose
    their--for example, they choose to declare dividends out of
    their cash. And that directly takes away cash from lending.
        In my view, basically if we roll back these regulations,
    what we will have on our hands will be another crisis, and
    everybody in this room should be warned about that.
        Senator Brown. Thank you.
        Let me ask everybody on the panel--and I would prefer a yes
    or no, and I think you can answer this yes or no. This
    Committee has talked for some time--and the sitting Chairman
    was a leader in this issue 3 or 4 years ago--about housing
    finance reform and its importance to economic growth. I will
    not ask you for detailed thoughts because that would be a long,
    long answer from each of you. But if you would answer yes or
    no, do you think we should have hearings on the topic of
    housing finance reform and have an open process where you can
    weigh in and we can discuss it? Mr. Simmons.
        Mr. Simmons. Absolutely.
        Senator Brown. Mr. Baer.
        Mr. Baer. Yes.
        Senator Brown. Mr. Hill.
        Mr. Hill. Yes.
        Senator Brown. Professor Omarova.
        Ms. Omarova. Yes.
        Senator Brown. OK. Thank you. If that is the case for
    housing reform--I will start again on the left--do you think it
    should also be the case for the significant changes to health
    care?
        Mr. Simmons. It is not the purpose of the hearing, but yes.
        Senator Brown. Mr. Baer.
        Mr. Baer. I do not know. It is not my area of expertise.
        Senator Brown. But you are a citizen.
        Mr. Baer. I am a citizen who has saved a lot of time in my
    life by not thinking about health care reform because it is so
    difficult to understand, and I am sort of full up on bank
    regulatory----
        Senator Brown. But do you think we should have an open
    process and discuss it?
        Mr. Baer. I think in general open processes are better than
    closed processes.
        Senator Brown. Mr. Hill.
        Mr. Hill. I tend to think health care is important to the
    vital health of the local economies, and that the more
    discussion we can have to move that along, the better.
        Senator Brown. Professor Omarova.
        Ms. Omarova. Absolutely. There must be an open, democratic,
    and fully vetted process for deciding such an important issue.
    We all have to know what is going on.
        Senator Brown. OK. Thank you. And if we screw up either
    effort, whether it is Dodd-Frank, whether it is housing finance
    reform, whether it is health care, clearly the economy pays a
    price. I mean, we know that.
        Let me ask one last question, Professor Omarova, and give
    your answer as short as you can in complying with the
    President's request--the Chairman's request. You are not the
    President.
        [Laughter.]
        Senator Brown. Professor, you said reasonable people may
    disagree and argue about whether the current size threshold,
    $50 billion in assets, is the right one or whether a higher or
    lower number would be more socially beneficial. How do we
    balance providing--as we talk about tailoring Section 165, as I
    think we should, how do we balance providing appropriate relief
    for regional banks against the intent of 165 to mitigate risk
    to financial stability?
        Ms. Omarova. Well, that is a complicated question, but the
    one clear answer is that we should not just simply remove all
    regulation from regional banks because they are less than $1
    trillion in assets. As a group, they still present significant
    risks. If they fail as a group in a correlated set of failures,
    that will probably tank regional economies and maybe the
    national economy.
        Think about the S&L crisis in the 1980s. Those were also
    very small and traditional lenders, and when they were
    deregulated, those small traditional lenders almost brought
    down the financial system. And that is what we should think
    about today. We cannot look at these regionals in isolation. We
    definitely should think about how to tailor regulatory burden
    for them, but we cannot just blankly remove all the regulations
    because they are smaller.
        Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Crapo [presiding]. Thank you.
        Senator Tillis.
        Senator Tillis. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for
    being here. I cannot imagine anyone sitting up at this dais
    would suggest just a blanket repeal of all regulations. It does
    not make sense. Regulations exist for a reason. Some of them
    are good. Some of them are awful. And I think that there are
    some manifestations of regulations that have been promulgated
    under Dodd-Frank that are absolutely awful.
        Mr. Baer, I want to ask you a question about the concept of
    tailoring the--instead of these simplistic, you know, $50
    billion, $250 billion sorts of thresholds that we create to
    determine the regulatory burden on the institution, I am more
    of a proponent of tailoring. I am getting to a point to where
    the regulatory burden is proportionate to the risk of the
    target being regulated. Could you give me some thought with
    respect to the regulatory environment that we have today--most
    of it is driven by Dodd-Frank; some of it pre-dated it--that
    you think lends itself to that kind of thought process and the
    benefits that you think would accrue by doing that?
        Mr. Baer. Yes, Senator, sure. I think when it comes to
    tailoring, you need to think about what risks does the
    institution present. You know, for example, does it have a
    capital markets business? Does it have multiple subsidiaries or
    only one? Is it primarily funded by deposits or is it funded in
    other ways? Then you think about what rule are we talking about
    here? Is it a living will? Is it capital requirements? Is it
    liquidity requirements? And then marry those two up.
        So, for example, the notion of having a living will for a
    small deposit-funded firm which is going to be in any event
    resolved, you know, under the pre-existing FDIC resolution
    process does not seem to make a lot of sense.
        There may be other rules. I mean, if you believe that there
    should not be proprietary trading, perhaps some of those rules
    should continue to apply. But, again, I think you need to make
    the decision based on firms in categories in terms of the risks
    they present and then the type of the rule you are talking
    about.
        Senator Tillis. The other thing that I find interesting, at
    least in some of the prior committees--I am sorry I was not
    here earlier; we have got four committees meeting at the same
    time, so I did not get to hear the testimony. But with an eye
    toward lean regulation, let us say that we go through that
    stratification, and we come up with a more coherent way of
    actually determining what regulatory burdens should be placed
    on a financial services institution. What about other areas in
    terms of executing-- and this is for anyone, but when I hear
    the big banks who would be at the highest level and have the
    highest amount of regs--and I guess in some cases if you get
    the methodology right, appropriately so. But would it make--how
    can it possibly make sense to have the stress test submissions
    be in the hundreds of thousands of pages? I mean, isn't there
    any thought given to how you create a leaner design around this
    and get the paperwork and the time and the costs associated
    with that out of it so that the consumers accrue a benefit, the
    money is being spent on value to the consumer versus compliance
    with the Government? Anyone have any opinion on specific things
    that we could potentially do to reduce that burden?
        Mr. Baer. I will just say briefly on CCAR, again, I think
    the length of the submission should vary with the complexity of
    the firm. There may be large firms that need very complex
    submissions. In fact, our view is with respect to the stress
    test that the DFAST models run by the banks, which are granular
    down to loan level, are actually appropriate and a better
    measure of capital perhaps than the opaque model that the
    Federal Reserve is running. But certainly for less complex
    firms, I think less burden would be appropriate.
        Mr. Hill. Senator, I would just add, if you look at--I
    could sit down and explain our balance sheet to you in about 5
    minutes. It is pretty simple. It does not take complex
    algorithms and quants to be able to figure out the sensitivity
    of our company. I think it ultimately comes down to capital,
    how much you hold--that is what is going to protect all of us
    when we have the next downturn. And I think the Basel limits, I
    think looking at capital rules, actually provide much more
    sound banking practices than some theoretical analysis on
    sensitivity.
        Mr. Simmons. I might just add, you know, our CCAR
    submission runs over 12,000 pages. You reach points of
    diminishing return pretty quickly in a very straightforward
    business model. We find the process itself to be useful, but
    the incredible degree of precision to which the Federal Reserve
    has pushed this does not yield benefits commensurate with the
    cost.
        Senator Tillis. We all know that has a disproportionate
    impact on smaller banking institutions, but all of the
    regulations that we are heaping on that I think have reached a
    point of diminishing returns we have got to look at and right-
    size. There was clearly a risk in 2008 that we had to produce
    regulations to avoid in the future, but we have clearly gone
    too far. And I have to take exception with anybody who thinks
    that everybody who wants a loan can get it today. The reality
    is a lot of people--it is sort of like people who leave the
    labor market, and so they are just not searching for work
    anymore. There are entire business enterprises that are not
    looking for capital because they do not think they can get it
    or the cost of getting it is just too great. And it is having a
    chilling effect on our economic growth. That is one of the
    reasons why we have such anemic economic growth. And unless we
    start right-sizing some of these regulations and recognize
    there is a lot of pent-up demand for capital and that the root
    of that are a lot of regulations that overreached in Dodd-
    Frank, then we are not going to get to the sort of economic
    activity that we need to get to, to then dig ourselves out of
    this $20 trillion in debt.
        On the report, I had a lot of questions to ask you, but I
    have gone over, and I normally do not go over, Mr. Chair.
        Chairman Crapo. We will take it out of next time.
        Senator Tillis. But there are a number of things that, if I
    may in follow-up questions for the record, I would like to go
    into the report itself, and some of the priorities and
    objectives, we would like your input, because I think this is
    critically--it is one of the most critical things we can do to
    really get economic activity where we need it to be.
        Thank you all for being here.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you.
        Senator Donnelly.
        Senator Donnelly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I actually only
    have one question, and that would be for Mr. Hill.
        Senator Toomey and I have previously introduced a bill to
    increase CFPB examination thresholds from $10 billion to $50
    billion. How would that make things better for your customers--
    not so much the bank, but what does that do for your customers?
        Mr. Hill. Senator, it is a great question. I think that you
    can take the CFPB, but you can take numerous parts of Dodd-
    Frank legislation and really kind of put them all under the
    same umbrella. Removing that $10 billion threshold for the
    company and also for a customer, it just makes things less
    complex. If we want to talk about getting more money to Main
    Street, more money to the individual, having one more regulator
    is not a way to accomplish that. We have multiple regulators
    already, and now we will have an additional one now that we
    just crossed CFPB.
        So I think a lot of this is about what makes sense and what
    simplifies it. We have a very close relationship with our
    regulators----
        Senator Donnelly. And it would not reduce safety or
    stability in your organization, would it?
        Mr. Hill. No, sir. Our primary regulator is the FDIC. We
    have a very close relationship. They are in----
        Senator Donnelly. Those are obviously critical elements.
        Mr. Hill. Absolutely. And I think they should be. I just
    think they can be done by our existing regulatory bodies.
        Senator Donnelly. All right. Thank you.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you, Senator Donnelly.
        Senator Donnelly. I made up for Mr. Tillis.
        Chairman Crapo. You did, and I appreciate it very much.
        As I indicated at the beginning of the hearing, we have a
    hard stop at 11 because we have three votes, and so I
    appreciate that time. You will get an extra credit.
        Senator Kennedy.
        Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too, am sorry
    I am late, but I was not watching ``The Price Is Right''. I was
    in a committee, OK?
        [Laughter.]
        Senator Kennedy. Mr. Hill, I wanted to--you have been
    there. Do you still run a bank? I notice you have been
    president and chief operating officer.
        Mr. Hill. Yes, sir. I am actively running the bank day to
    day and have been for the last 22 years.
        Senator Kennedy. About $8 billion in assets?
        Mr. Hill. We just crossed $10 billion in January. We are
    roughly $11.5 billion today.
        Senator Kennedy. How many people do you have in your
    compliance department?
        Mr. Hill. This is an estimate, but it would be roughly 50
    direct employees, but then there are numerous compliance people
    embedded in our lines of business across our company.
        Senator Kennedy. So some do it full-time, some do it part-
    time.
        Mr. Hill. And some are just in a full-time compliance role,
    and some are in the active day-to-day administering of the
    process. And so there is some overlap there. But compared to 5
    or 6 years ago, that is probably tenfold.
        Senator Kennedy. OK. That was my question. Tenfold.
        Mr. Hill. And if you look at the cost of that--I look at
    ultimately what does that mean to the customer. I think Senator
    Donnelly's question was: What does it mean to the customer?
    What this means to the customer for a mortgage loan is our cost
    to deliver a mortgage loan is roughly $1,000 more today than it
    was just a few years ago, mainly because of the increased
    compliance costs.
        Senator Kennedy. OK. Let me break that down, though. Today
    you have roughly 50, plus a number of employees that are part-
    time, if you will, and that is tenfold. OK?
        Mr. Hill. Yes.
        Senator Kennedy. How much are you spending on those 50
    employees?
        Mr. Hill. It would be, you know--I guess it would be in the
    several million dollars range.
        Senator Kennedy. OK. And do you believe that these
    additional employees are a direct result of Dodd-Frank?
        Mr. Hill. Oh, they are. Yes, sir. To comply with the rules
    and regulations, two things happened: We had to close ten
    offices. We saved almost $5 million from closing those ten
    offices. All that money was spent directly on complying with
    Dodd-Frank.
        Now, there is a lot more than just that $5 million, but
    that all was directly spent--a large part of that was in
    process and compliance-related efforts.
        Senator Kennedy. How much did your bank make last year?
        Mr. Hill. Our company last year made--this is an estimate.
        Senator Kennedy. Sure.
        Mr. Hill. In the $65 million range.
        Senator Kennedy. OK. Has Dodd-Frank helped at all?
        Mr. Hill. Yes, sir. I do believe there have been parts of
    Dodd-Frank that have been positive. I think the most important
    piece is the capital. The banking industry as a whole is
    holding more capital today than we did. We are less leveraged
    as an industry. That is the ultimate safety net. Regulation is
    not the ultimate safety net. Capital is the ultimate safety
    net. And banks across the board today are holding more
    capital--our bank included. But we never levered up like many
    of the large companies did. We are still holding more capital
    than we have.
        So there have been things that have been done that have
    been vitally important. But to go back to the $10 billion
    threshold, we are choking out the most vitally important part
    of our community banking system by having this arbitrary
    threshold. And it is making people leave the industry or
    significantly limiting their ability to impact their local
    community because we are--while we are in the same industry as
    the large banks, we are really significantly different
    companies.
        Senator Kennedy. You have been in this business--well, you
    all have. Has there ever been a time when the Federal
    Government and its regulation of your industry really did sit
    down and say what are the costs and what are the benefits and
    make the sort of calculation that normal people do every day in
    their business or in their family? Or is that just lip service?
    Have we ever done it right?
        Mr. Hill. Senator, I have been doing this 30 years. I have
    seen a lot of regulation come and go. Most of it has been
    constructive. You figure out a way to deal with it. And I have
    never felt the need to reach out to a Senator about that
    regulation until now. But this arbitrary $10 billion threshold
    is a painful process that is costing our consumer and our
    communities and local economies, and we are overregulating a
    systemically important part of our economy, which is our
    community banks.
        Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you.
        Senator Cortez Masto.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        I am actually over here in the corner. Good morning. Thank
    you for joining us.
        So let me start off with the first question, and I will
    open it up to the panel. As a new Senator from the great State
    of Nevada, I was not here for the debate on Wall Street reform,
    but let me tell you, as the Attorney General there for 8 years
    watching as the crisis unfolded and the impact to the State of
    Nevada, I was paying close attention. If you do not know, it
    was ground zero for the foreclosure crisis, highest
    unemployment, more people in foreclosure than, I think, in the
    rest of the country. At one point in time, 64 weeks, we had the
    highest rate of foreclosure, highest loan-to-value ratio, 70
    percent of homeowners underwater. Devastating.
        And so I am curious your thoughts on this. One thing I am
    concerned about what I have seen is that President Trump's
    Executive order on financial regulation did not once mention
    consumer or investor protection. And in looking at the 150-page
    report that was released by the Treasury Department this week
    in response to that Executive order, they did not offer one
    single example where additional protections for students,
    servicemembers, or seniors were needed.
        If we are going to do a wholesale review of financial
    rules, shouldn't we look at both additional needed protections
    and regulatory relief? Isn't that the type of balance we should
    be looking at? I open that up to all of you.
        Mr. Baer. Senator, I agree. I think absolutely, you know,
    any review of post-crisis regulation should include consumer
    regulation. I think, you know, one issue that we focused on----
        Senator Cortez Masto. Not consumer regulation. Consumer
    protection and regulations to protect consumers.
        Mr. Baer. Absolutely.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Right.
        Mr. Baer. I agree.
        Mr. Simmons. In my view, a lot of the products--we operate
    in Nevada. It is Nevada State Bank. And we suffered huge
    losses, not from mortgages but from financing land improvements
    and from businesses. And so we certainly experienced a lot of
    that pain.
        There have been a lot of consumer protections put in and
    many of them probably necessary. We ought to be looking at
    both. But the combination, the layering of all of this has made
    this industry increasingly sclerotic and unable to meet the
    legitimate needs of customers in a way that is sensible and
    prudent and logical.
        And so I think any of us would be open to looking at are
    there needs for additional consumer protections. That should be
    on the table. But that is not where the real problem is from
    the point of view of us who are trying to deliver services to
    consumers and businesses who are in need of them today.
        Senator Cortez Masto. So one of the consumer protections
    that I thought was very important and I fought for as Attorney
    General were servicing standards. I think we need those, and I
    am concerned that there is this idea that we need to do away
    with them, roll those back somehow. I am curious your thoughts
    on that.
        Mr. Simmons. I am not aware of any argument being made by
    the industry to roll back any protections for consumers in the
    servicing standards. I do not think that is what we are here to
    defend.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Great. Thank you.
        Anyone else have any other comments in general about
    consumer protection and that should be a part of this
    discussion?
        Mr. Hill. Senator, we are a community bank. We have roughly
    700,000 customers. I think the overarching thing for us is
    doing away with the $10 billion threshold because we are
    treating community banks like large banks. And I think that
    consumer protection is a vitally important part of the role for
    regulatory bodies and also for the banks. But I just think it
    can be done by our existing regulator. We do not need a new
    regulator for a community bank with 100 offices to be able to
    do that. FDIC is in our offices almost year round, knows our
    company very, very well, and I think it effectively enforces
    that protection.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you.
        Dr. Omarova, do you have any comments?
        Ms. Omarova. I just have a general sort of observation that
    banks will never publicly say anything against consumer
    protection per se because that is bad PR, and yet they always
    admit that the second that regulatory costs increase, they will
    immediately pass those regulatory costs on to consumers. And
    then they say, therefore, you should not regulate us because it
    is costly.
        To me, that is not consumer protection. Banks'
    shareholders, banks' managers, those are the guys who should be
    eating those additional regulatory costs. To me, that is the
    essence of consumer protection in practice.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you. Go ahead.
        Mr. Baer. Senator, not, you know, purely consumer
    protection, but I do think there is a lot of research to be
    done, and we have done some research, including a recent
    edition of our quarterly magazine, around the question of
    income inequality and bank regulation. I think the evidence
    shows that one outcome of a lot of the post-crisis rules,
    including even down to the level of stress testing, where the
    assumption is that there is a very large rise in unemployment,
    which tends to cause banks to, you know, more highly price
    loans to people who are subject to that or are likely to be
    affected by that spike in unemployment. There has definitely
    been an increase in the price of credit to people at the lower-
    income end of the spectrum, and a lot of that in very subtle
    but very meaningful ways has to do with regulation. And so,
    yes, consumer protection is really important, but we also think
    access to credit for consumers, particularly low- and moderate-
    income consumers, is really important. And that is the reason
    that we have devoted increasing amounts of our research to it,
    but we really think others should as well.
        Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you. I notice my time is up.
    Thank you very much for your comments.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you. And as I have indicated before,
    we have a hard stop at 11 o'clock. I have not asked my
    questions yet. That makes three of us if no one else comes. I
    am going to have Senator Cotton and then Senator Warren go.
    That will give me a couple of minutes at the end, and maybe I
    can scoot it a little past 11 and get my 5 minutes in, too.
        Senator Cotton.
        Senator Cotton. Will I get my bills and amendments voted on
    earlier if I give my time to you?
        [Laughter.]
        Chairman Crapo. Oh, yeah. There is extra credit here.
        Senator Cotton. Mr. Hill, I know you have spoken about the
    various threshold levels, $10 billion, $50 billion, and the
    burdens those bring. I want to talk a little bit about the
    arbitrariness of that. Obviously, anytime you pick a number, it
    is somewhat arbitrary, you know, whether it is the designation
    for a systemically important financial institution or a speed
    limit or an age to vote or an age to drink alcohol. But in this
    field, I mean, what are we talking about here in terms of an
    institution that might hit a $10 or a $50 billion threshold?
    Are we talking about thousands or hundreds of thousands of
    institutions? Or are we talking of a scale of maybe a few
    dozen?
        Mr. Hill. Well, if you look at the 10 to 50 ranks, there
    are 79 of us.
        Senator Cotton. OK. That is what I thought. It would seem
    that that could be done on a more discriminating basis than an
    arbitrary threshold, wouldn't it?
        Mr. Hill. Yes, sir. It is just not a risk-based approach,
    and companies--customers are different and banks are different.
    A risk-based approach versus a one-size-fits-all regulation
    does not make sense. In my mind, it is quite simple. The role
    here is risk management. We do not want another financial
    crisis. And the risks come from the ``too big to fail'' banks.
    So, to me, we need to regulate them as one industry, and then
    outside of that, they are mostly community banks or large
    community banks like our company. And I think those are very
    different type banks.
        Senator Cotton. So, in principle, you could have a $50
    billion bank, or a $500 billion bank for that matter, that is
    relatively plain vanilla, conservative, and, therefore, not all
    that risky?
        Mr. Hill. Well, I cannot speak to all the 500. I can speak
    to the 10 to 50s, and I think I can speak to a bank somewhat
    like Mr. Simmons', which is basically just a larger community
    bank. But because we have done things right, because we have
    attracted customers, because we help small businesses, we have
    grown. And today we are penalized when we take that incremental
    dollar over $10 billion.
        Senator Cotton. And when you say ``community bank'' there,
    to be exact, in this context, I think I understand you to mean
    focusing on the functions that a bank performs.
        Mr. Hill. Operating as a community bank. While we are $11.5
    billion today, our operating model is the same as it was when
    we were $400 million. We are just in more communities.
        Senator Cotton. Isn't there an old joke about taking it in
    at 3, lending it out at 6, and hitting the golf course by 3:00?
        [Laughter.]
        Mr. Hill. I think that was before I joined the industry.
        Senator Cotton. But the point being that this risk analysis
    is primarily--or this analysis should be primarily risk-based,
    based on the nature of the institutions, or the nature of the
    functions an institution performs, and, therefore, a relatively
    large institution can be engaged in relatively low-risk
    activities. But by the same token, an institution of less than
    $50 or less than $10 billion, because of the nature of its
    positions and interlocking counterparties could actually be
    quite risky. Correct?
        Mr. Hill. Correct. And I think just the opposite of that.
    We want to incent less risk in our financial services industry.
    So what better way to do that than hold the adequate amount of
    capital, be in the less risky businesses. We have never done
    any proprietary trading. So if you are in that business, hold
    more capital. You are going to have more regulation. But if you
    do operate a simple business model that positively impacts our
    community, those are the ones that we have to be careful that
    we do not go too far. Dodd-Frank did a lot of good things. It
    overreached in this $10 to $50 billion sector and treated that
    sector as it does many of the large banks in our country.
        Senator Cotton. OK. Just to tie a bow on this part of the
    conversation, I would say that I think the size of an
    institution obviously needs to be a part of this analysis, but
    a simple size-based approach does not seem to make much sense
    to me. And given the number of institutions we are discussing
    here, you would think that our financial regulatory agencies
    could have a more discriminating approach. Again, we are not
    dealing with, you know, millions of Americans who become 18
    years old every year and, therefore, we just have to draw an
    arbitrary line, even though we all know that some 17-year-olds
    are very mature and exercise good judgment and plenty of 19-
    year-olds do not, when you are talking about something on the
    order of a few dozen institutions that we can take a more
    sensible and case-by-case approach, with size being one factor
    in that analysis.
        I will yield 40 second back to the Chairman so I can get a
    chit in the future.
        Chairman Crapo. We will keep that record.
        Senator Warren.
        Senator Warren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        So after the financial crisis, Congress determined that
    banks with more than $50 billion in assets--this is about
    roughly the 40 biggest banks in the country--posed a greater
    risk to the economy than community banks and credit unions. And
    so we required the Federal Reserve to apply tougher rules and
    more oversight to those banks. And now those banks want to
    eliminate the $50 billion threshold. They want to cut all but
    the very biggest banks loose from stricter oversight, and they
    want to restrict the Federal regulators from applying tougher
    rules except under somewhat more limited circumstances. So, in
    other words, this is about rolling back a big part of Dodd-
    Frank, and I just want to take a look at that.
        Mr. Simmons, you are the CEO of Zions Bank, which is one of
    the banks that would avoid tougher rules under the industry's
    proposal. And in your written testimony, you argue that the
    current approach covers too many banks given the minimal risks
    posed by banks like yours, and that we are unnecessarily making
    it harder for banks like yours to lend. Do I have that about
    right?
        Mr. Simmons. Yeah.
        Senator Warren. Yeah, OK. Now, those arguments sounded very
    familiar to me, so I went back and looked, and it turns out
    that back in September of 2006, just 2 years before the
    financial crisis, you were the head of Zions Bank, and you
    testified before the House Financial Services Committee. Your
    testimony strongly opposed guidance from Federal regulators
    that increased the oversight for banks that had a high
    concentration of commercial real estate loans. Regulators were
    worried that the banks were overly exposed to one category of
    lending and that might put them at greater risk of failing. You
    thought, ``Ah, there is no problem.'' And in opposing the
    guidance--I want to quote you on this--you said, ``The guidance
    has been proposed at a time when the banking industry is
    exceptionally healthy.''
        Another one from you in this testimony: ``Commercial real
    estate loans in particular have performed exceptionally well.''
        Another one: ``By using blanket industry-wide guidance to
    address concentrations, the regulators risk choking off the
    flow of credit from banks that are engaging in commercial real
    estate lending in a safe, sound, and profitable manner.''
        Now, within 2 years of your testimony, the bank you led,
    Zions, needed nearly $1.5 billion in taxpayer bailout money to
    stay afloat. And here is the kicker: That was in part because
    your bank was highly concentrated in commercial real estate
    lending, the exact thing that you told Congress was not an
    issue, nothing to worry about.
        So, Mr. Simmons, when you say today that Congress can
    safely roll back the rules on banks like yours and there will
    not be any risks to taxpayers, why should anyone believe you?
        Mr. Simmons. Well, listen, what we are saying is that the
    enhanced prudential standards in Section 165 of Dodd-Frank are
    industrial strength and intended, in my way of thinking about
    this, for institutions that pose a----
        Senator Warren. Mr. Simmons, let me stop you right there
    because I know we are really trying to do this quickly. I am
    not asking you to repeat your argument. We have already agreed
    on what your argument is. The question I am asking, given your
    previous testimony about how there is no problem here, and then
    it turned out you needed $1.5 billion in bailout money on
    exactly the thing you testified was not a problem, I am asking
    why anybody should believe you when you come in here today and
    say no problem in this area, let the $50 billion and above
    banks go ahead. I am just trying to understand why you have any
    credibility on this issue.
        Mr. Simmons. Well, listen, because I deal with it every
    day, and because----
        Senator Warren. Well, you dealt with it every day back when
    you testified in 2006, and the taxpayers had to pony up $1.5
    billion to save your bank.
        Mr. Simmons. Listen, every large bank took TARP money and
    without----
        Senator Warren. I am sorry. So your argument is that you
    were right or wrong----
        Mr. Simmons. The one large bank that did not receive it,
    National City, was sold a week later. This was a matter of
    preserving confidence across the industry. Our capital, our
    equity capital, always remained above the regulatory minimums.
        Senator Warren. I am sorry, Mr. Simmons. Are you trying to
    make the argument that you did not have a problem? You know,
    because actually----
        Mr. Simmons. We incurred stress, but we never saw equity
    capital, common equity capital----
        Senator Warren. Let us just be clear about----
        Mr. Simmons. --decline below the regulatory minimums.
        Senator Warren. ----the problem. The regulators actually
    went back in 2013 to reexamine their earlier guidance, the
    guidance you had said was unnecessary, and they found, ``During
    the 3-year economic downturn, banks with high commercial real
    estate concentration levels proved to be far more susceptible
    to failure. Specifically, 23 percent of the banks that were
    highly concentrated in commercial real estate lending,'' what
    you had testified about, ``failed compared with only one-half
    of 1 percent of the banks that were not.''
        So I understand we are out of time. I just want to say
    here, you know, what I notice about this is whenever things are
    going OK, the banks come in here and say, ``Yay, let us reduce
    the rules, let us let everybody go out. What could possibly go
    wrong?'' And then when things go wrong, banks like yours line
    up and say to the taxpayers, ``Bail me out.''
        Our job is to make sure that we do not permit the next
    failure to happen because it helps short-term bank profits. Our
    job is to watch out for the taxpayers and the security of this
    economy.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for going over.
        Chairman Crapo. We are going to put that on your record,
    too.
        [Laughter.]
        Chairman Crapo. Just kidding.
        Senator Warren. Well, it is not the first time.
        Chairman Crapo. Thank you. And I will take my questions
    now. I will try not to go 5 minutes because we do have a vote
    starting in about 1 minute.
        Mr. Simmons, I would like to ask you to finish the comment
    that you were making just a moment ago with Senator Warren
    about your equity capital back at the time when the stress
    started to arise and the collapse in the housing market.
        Mr. Simmons. Well, listen, capital across the industry has
    increased dramatically. It has for us. It has more than
    doubled. It is about 120 percent of what it was back in 2006.
    Common equity capital, relative to risk-weighted assets, has
    increased from about 5.5 percent to about 12.2 percent. So we
    have not only a strong industry, but we have the strongest
    banking industry in the world. So there is a lot of equity
    capital in the industry today.
        Chairman Crapo. All right. Thank you. And again, Mr.
    Simmons, over the past few years, a number of financial
    regulators have made comments before this Committee supporting
    changes to the $50 billion SIFI threshold, including Federal
    Reserve Chair Yellen, former Federal Reserve Governor Tarullo,
    and former Comptroller Curry, and these are those who are the
    regulators, in some cases were the regulators who are tasked
    with getting it right to deal with the risk in our economy.
        While there are different views on what to replace the
    threshold with, it seems to me there is general bipartisan
    agreement that a bank is not systemically important simply
    because its assets exceed $50 billion. If the SIFI threshold
    was amended so that noncomplex banks like Zions were no longer
    subject to those enhanced standards, how would that impact the
    broader economy?
        Mr. Simmons. Well, it would--as I indicated, we have
    become, I think, as an industry quite--just sclerotic in terms
    of our ability to do business. I have a letter here from a
    customer up in Seattle. It says, ``When Kerri''--I talked to
    one of our people up there. ``When Kerri Knudsen informed me
    last week the bank could not provide construction financing for
    my upcoming development project, I was shocked. The concept
    that a $3 million construction loan was not possible left me
    dumbfounded. It leaves me incredulous that a multi-billion-
    dollar institution is maxed out.'' It goes on to talk about
    this. ``After 22 years of doing business together, I hit the
    streets looking for a construction loan.''
        We find ourselves trying to guess what is in the Federal
    Reserve's models, in their CCAR models. We know that it is--I
    mean, we have some vague outline of how--you know, what the
    results are, but we do not know really how it is treating
    individual loans. This lack of transparency is my major beef
    with the CCAR regime. But the overlay of all of these
    regulations has made it increasingly difficult to do business,
    and for us, small businesses are sort of our forte, and we feel
    kind of crippled in terms of our ability to serve them.
        Chairman Crapo. Well, thank you. And I actually get letters
    and visits from businessmen and women in Idaho who have the
    same kind of concerns about the inability to get the kind of
    financing that just seems so obviously appropriate. So I
    understand the point you are making.
        And one other point there quickly. If banks over $50
    billion right now were no longer subject to the SIFI
    thresholds, the $50 billion SIFI threshold, isn't it true that
    they are still subject to very extensive safety and soundness
    regulation across the system?
        Mr. Simmons. Absolutely. Always have been, always will be.
    And stress testing will remain a central part of what we do.
        Chairman Crapo. And they will still conduct stress tests.
        Mr. Simmons. Absolutely.
        Chairman Crapo. I wanted to make it clear. Some make it
    look like there is an exemption of regulation being discussed
    here. It is a refinement and a tailoring of the type of
    regulation that we are talking about.
        Obviously, my time is up, and I think you heard the bells
    go off, so this is going to have to be my last question, and
    this is for you, Mr. Hill. I apologize to the other witnesses.
    I do have questions for you, too. I will submit those.
        But you mentioned in your opening testimony that your bank
    recently crossed above the $10 threshold and as a result needs
    to comply with numerous additional requirements, including the
    Dodd-Frank Act stress test known as DFAST. Can you explain the
    various steps your bank has had to take to comply with this
    requirement?
        Mr. Hill. Well, I think from a financial perspective, the
    overall cost is several million dollars, and most of that is in
    terms of buying very sophisticated models to stress-test our
    bank under various different circumstances and add the
    quantitative--the employees who have a quantitative background
    to be able to do that. And so the ultimate impact is several
    million dollars, more overhead, more complexity, for a balance
    sheet that is relatively simple.
        Chairman Crapo. And has that caused the cost of a mortgage
    to your customers to go up?
        Mr. Hill. Our costs of our mortgage loans have risen
    multifaceted. I do not think you could put it all on DFAST or
    QM or any others. But when you put all that regulation together
    that comes with that $10 billion threshold, for every mortgage
    loans we make it costs us $1,000 more to make it today than it
    did just a few years ago.
        Chairman Crapo. And who pays that $1,000?
        Mr. Hill. It ends up out of the customer's pocket.
        Chairman Crapo. So if we were talking about consumer
    protection, if we could reduce the cost of that mortgage and
    still maintain the safety and soundness, would that not be some
    of the best consumer protection we could achieve?
        Mr. Hill. It seems very logical to me, Senator.
        Chairman Crapo. Well, thank you.
        And to the others here, I apologize I did not get toy with
    my questions. I apologize to everybody. Usually we have the
    time to go on and have even a second round of questions. But
    today we are wrapping up an Iran sanctions bill, and we are
    going to be doing the final three votes on it starting right
    now.
        So before I close this hearing, I want to alert all
    Senators that they should submit their further questions by
    Thursday, and you will probably receive some further written
    questions. I urge you to respond to those written questions as
    promptly as you can.
        Again, I want to thank all of you for coming and giving us
    your time and your advice today. I assure you that both your
    written and your oral testimony is very thoroughly reviewed and
    utilized by us, and we are working together to try to build a
    very strong package.
        As you probably are aware, we are not calling it
    ``regulatory reform.'' We are calling it ``economic growth.''
    And we are looking for statutory and regulatory reforms that
    will help to grow the economy while still maintaining safety
    and soundness in our financial institutions. I think that is
    achievable. Thank you for being here to help us on that.
        With that, this hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 11:07 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
        [Prepared statements, responses to written questions, and
    additional material supplied for the record follow:]
                    PREPARED STATEMENT OF HARRIS H. SIMMONS
     Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Zions Bancorporation, on behalf
                         of the Regional Bank Coalition
                                 June 15, 2017
    I. Introduction
        Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, and Members of the Committee,
    thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this morning. I am
    Chairman and CEO of Zions Bancorporation, a $65 billion dollar (total
    assets) bank holding company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. We
    primarily operate in 11 western States, with local management teams and
    brand names, from Texas to the West Coast, including the Chairman's
    home State of Idaho, where we are the third largest bank in the market,
    and where we have consistently been the largest SBA lender. Indeed, we
    have a particular focus on serving small and midsized businesses and
    municipalities throughout the West. We believe we are very good at
    serving such customers, and are proud to have been consistently
    recognized by small and middle-market businesses as one of the best
    banks in the Nation in providing banking services to such clients, as
    measured by the number of Excellence Awards conferred through Greenwich
    Research Associates' survey of approximately 30,000 small and middle
    market businesses across the country each year. Virtually all our
    banking activities are very traditional in nature, with a
    straightforward business model that is highly focused on taking
    deposits, making loans, and providing our customers with a high degree
    of service. We are primarily a commercial lender, which is to say that
    we are especially focused on lending to businesses. We provide
    approximately one-third as much credit to businesses, in loan sizes
    between $100,000 and $1,000,000, as Bank of America does in aggregate--
    underscoring our focus on serving smaller businesses in the markets we
    serve. And we do so without presenting the type of systemic risk that
    is characteristic of the very largest banking organizations. Together
    with other regional banks, we are highly focused on delivering credit
    and depository services to the small and midsized businesses that have
    been America's engine of economic growth.
        Zions Bancorporation has the distinction of currently being the
    smallest of the Systemically Important Financial Institutions--or
    ``SIFIs''--in accordance with the $50 billion asset threshold for the
    determination of systemic importance as defined in section 165 of the
    Dodd-Frank Act. And while we are proud of the services we provide to
    our customers, and believe we incrementally make a real difference in
    the local markets in which we operate, we certainly do not consider
    ourselves to be systemically important to the United States economy. We
    in fact half-jokingly refer to our company as an ``Itty Bitty SIFI,''
    and we see evidence that an increasing number of thoughtful observers,
    including our own regulators, are of the opinion that we, and other
    regional banks, are of neither the size, complexity nor critical
    importance to the workings of the U.S. economy to warrant the scope,
    intensity and cost of additional regulation that the automatic
    designation as a SIFI carries with it. \1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \1\ See, e.g., remarks of Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel K.
    Tarullo in his testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking,
    Housing, and Urban Affairs, March 19, 2015.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    II. Regional Banks Have Simpler Business Models That Fundamentally Pose
            Less Risk Than the Nation's Largest Money Center Banks
        Regional banks overwhelmingly operate with straightforward,
    traditional business models that focus on receiving deposits and making
    loans. In my own bank's case, only 4.8 percent of our total assets are
    financed with short-term nondeposit liabilities. And the great majority
    of our loans are secured with various forms of collateral, providing a
    secondary means of repayment. Like community banks, regional banks
    focus on providing credit not only to consumers, but to small and
    midsized businesses. For example, in the case of Zions Bancorporation,
    business loans between $100,000 and $1 million in size comprise 19
    percent of our entire commercial loan portfolio, as compared to
    approximately 2 percent for Citigroup and 7 percent for JPMorgan Chase.
        The revenue streams of regional banks are primarily generated
    through lending spread income and the provision of ancillary services
    to customers with long-term relationships with the bank. There is much
    less focus on ``transactional'' income from trading and capital markets
    activities. Indeed, approximately 90 percent of the banking industry's
    total trading income last year was generated by five of the industry's
    largest banks, each of which is considered by regulators to be a Global
    Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB), and none of which was a regional
    institution.
        Using a more fulsome measure of risk than sheer asset size, 2 years
    ago the Treasury Department's Office of Financial Research (OFR)
    published a report on the relative systemic risk posed by 33 U.S. bank
    holding companies. \2\ The methodology employed was a systemic risk
    scorecard developed by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision (Basel
    Committee) and published by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), using
    data provided by bank holding companies on Federal Reserve Form Y-15
    with regard to an institution's size, interconnectedness,
    substitutability, complexity and cross-jurisdictional activities. The
    highest score, denoted as a percentage, belonged to JPMorgan Chase &
    Co., with a score of 5.05 percent, followed by Citigroup at 4.27
    percent. Applying the OFR/Basel Committee methodology to the two dozen
    regional banks with assets of over $50 billion, and thus designated as
    Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) under provisions
    of the Dodd-Frank Act, the aggregate risk score of the regionals as a
    group (including banks as large as U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial
    Services Group, Inc.) is less than the score of either JPMorgan Chase
    or Citigroup. The very largest banks, which pose the type of systemic
    risk to the economy that Section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act was meant to
    circumscribe, are characterized by not only substantially larger
    nominal asset exposures than those presented by regional banks, but
    also by complex--and often global--organizational structures,
    substantial off-balance sheet and market-making activities, and a high
    degree of interconnectedness throughout the financial sector and in the
    larger economy. For example, while JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s balance sheet
    is 39 times the size of Zions Bancorporation's, it's total payments
    activity last year was 616 times larger than Zions' levels, and its
    total derivatives exposures are 5,253 times larger than ours. The same
    general relative risk exposures characterize the entire regional bank
    group.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \2\ Office of Financial Research Brief Series, 15-01, February 12,
    2015.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    III. The Dodd-Frank Act's Arbitrary Asset Thresholds Are Stifling Our
            Ability To Serve Customers and Foster Economic Growth
    a. Stress Testing and Capital Planning
        As a covered institution, or SIFI, under section 165 of the Dodd-
    Frank Act, Zions Bancorporation is subject not only to the Act's
    rigorous stress testing (Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test, or ``DFAST'')
    requirements, but to the annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and
    Review (CCAR) conducted in conjunction with the annual DFAST exercise.
    The DFAST process is intensive, time-consuming and costly. It involves
    the development and continual maintenance of sophisticated statistical
    models designed to project a bank's performance over the course of a
    hypothetical nine-quarter period of severe economic stress, using
    scenarios incorporating a variety of macroeconomic variables supplied
    annually by the Federal Reserve, and supplemented by a bank holding
    company's own variables and assumptions reflecting any of its
    idiosyncratic risk exposures. These statistical models are expected to
    be capable of projecting the likely outcomes and interrelated effects
    of each line item on a bank holding company's income statement and
    balance sheet, and the resulting impact on capital levels, based on a
    granular analysis of a bank's individual assets and liabilities. They
    must be developed based on historical performance, back-tested,
    validated, audited, and documented. So-called ``challenger'' models
    must also be developed to identify potential weaknesses inherent in the
    more material primary models. And the entire process must be conducted
    under a rigorous governance process involving both the bank's
    management and board of directors.
        Each of the bank holding companies required to participate in the
    Federal Reserve's supervisory stress test exercise furnishes the
    Federal Reserve with millions of data elements derived from individual
    loans and other balance sheet items on Form FR Y-14. This data is used
    both in the banks' internal stress tests and in the Federal Reserve's
    own models to project risk-weighted assets and capital levels during,
    and at the conclusion of, the hypothetical period of severe stress in
    an attempt to ensure that capital levels under stress will not breach
    minimum regulatory standards. The CCAR exercise builds on the DFAST
    process by incorporating a firm's projected capital actions over the
    nine-quarter projection period. The objective is to determine that a
    bank holding company's projected capital actions would not, during a
    period of stress such as that reflected in the stress test, impair
    capital levels below required regulatory capital thresholds.
        After evaluating the results of its own and the banks' stress tests
    and capital plans, the Federal Reserve provides each covered
    institution with a quantitative assessment of its capital levels. \3\
    Zions Bancorporation has been a participant in the CCAR process for the
    past several years. We have spent well over $25 million in outside
    consulting feels, and many thousands of hours of management and board
    time focused on CCAR. We annually submit the equivalent of
    approximately 12,500 pages of detailed mathematical models, analysis
    and narrative to the Federal Reserve incorporating our CCAR projections
    and capital plans. We also complete a mid-year stress test exercise to
    complement the more intensive annual submission.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \3\ The Federal Reserve also provides large, complex banking
    organizations (which it generally defines as those with over $250
    billion in assets) with a qualitative assessment of stress testing and
    capital planning processes. Regional banks have previously been given
    such qualitative assessments; however, the Federal Reserve announced on
    January 30, 2017, that it would discontinue that practice, while at the
    same time tightening regulations regarding capital distributions to
    shareholders without seeking Federal Reserve Board approval.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        I view stress testing as a fundamentally important tool in the
    management of a bank's risk and the assessment of its capital adequacy.
    The value of the insights it yields, however, does not increase in
    linear proportion to the investment made in the exercise, and this is
    particularly true for less complex regional banking institutions. There
    are diminishing returns from this exercise for both the banking
    institutions and the regulators. Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel
    K. Tarullo has noted that `` . . . the basic requirements for the
    aggregation and reporting of data conforming to our supervisory model
    and for firms to run our scenarios through their own models do entail
    substantial expenditures of out-of-pocket and human resources. This can
    be a considerable challenge for a $60 billion or $70 billion bank. On
    the other side of the ledger, while we do derive some supervisory
    benefits from inclusion of these banks toward the lower end of the
    range in the supervisory stress tests, those benefits are relatively
    modest, and we believe we could probably realize them through other
    supervisory means.'' \4\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \4\ Former Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel K. Tarullo, in
    remarks to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban
    Affairs, March 19, 2015.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Ideally, the stress testing process should inform management's and
    the board's thinking about managing credit concentrations, interest
    rate risk, underwriting standards, pricing, and maintaining an
    appropriate balance of risks in its portfolio. In our own experience,
    these objectives are largely thwarted by the reality that the results
    of the Federal Reserve's internal models trump our own internally
    modeled results. Although the Federal Reserve has posed no material
    objection to Zions Bancorporation's qualitative processes in recent
    CCAR cycles, its own modeled measures of my firm's capital ratios after
    nine quarters of severely adverse economic conditions have been
    consistently and materially below our own projected outcomes. Such
    variances in outcomes beg a reconciliation of the models used by each
    organization if the results are to be truly useful in the management of
    the company. And while Federal Reserve officials argue that
    ``transparency around the stress testing exercise improves the
    credibility of the exercise and creates accountability both for firms
    and supervisors,'' \5\ they continue to maintain that it is important
    not to disclose details of their models, lest firms ``manage to the
    test.'' Certainly it is not difficult to understand a regulator's
    perspective about this, but the notion that the rules--which are
    effectively incorporated into those models' algorithms--governing
    banks' capital distributions to the firms' owners should be kept secret
    finds little if any parallel in our legal and regulatory system.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \5\ Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, speaking
    at the Riksbank Macroprudential Conference, June 24, 2015.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        This lack of transparency has the effect of creating uncertainty,
    and because the Federal Reserve's modeled capital results become the
    ``binding constraint'' for capital planning by most banks, including my
    own, we are necessarily led to attempt to ``manage to the test''--even
    if it's not clear how the test works. This uncertainty echoes recent
    comments by former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel K. Tarullo, who
    noted that ``while enhanced prudential standards are important to
    ensure that larger banks can continue to provide credit even in periods
    of stress, some of those same enhancements could actually inhibit
    credit extension by rendering the reasonable business models of middle-
    sized and smaller banks unprofitable.'' \6\ Federal Reserve Governor
    Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Fed's Committee on Supervision and
    Regulation, recently indicated in a televised interview his desire to
    have the Fed provide ``much more granular information about our
    expectations for loss rates on particular portfolios, of corporate
    loans and other types of loans.'' \7\ While any improvement in
    communicating outcomes is welcomed, real transparency will only be
    attained when the Federal Reserve publishes details about the actual
    content and mechanics of the models it uses to effectively govern
    banks' capital levels, opening them to the kind of outside scrutiny and
    debate which would inevitably result in stronger modeling processes.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \6\ Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel K. Tarullo--before the
    U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, March 19,
    2015.
         \7\ CNBC, June 1, 2017, Steve Liesman interview with Governor
    Jerome Powell.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In the absence of such transparency, banks are left to guess what
    level of capital is required for each type of loan, and indeed for each
    individual loan, since every loan has a unique blend of borrower
    strength, collateral support and other characteristics that define
    risk.
        The uncertainty surrounding the Fed's modeling processes in CCAR
    can cause banks to withdraw or limit certain types of lending. In our
    own case, we've in particular established limits on construction and
    term commercial real estate lending that are significantly more
    conservative than those incorporated in current interagency guidelines
    on commercial real estate risk management. \8\ Another example of the
    uncertainty around the Federal Reserve's models involves small business
    loans. The detailed FR Y-14 data templates used for the Federal
    Reserve's models to capture granular data on collateral values and
    other factors useful in evaluating potential loss exposures for
    commercial loans expressly exclude loans of less than $1 million and
    credit-scored owner-occupied commercial real estate loans, the
    combination of which comprises a substantial portion of our total loan
    portfolio. Rather, such loans are reported on a supplemental schedule
    that includes only the loan balances. We can therefore only suppose
    that such loans are treated relatively more harshly in the Federal
    Reserve's models, resulting in uncertainty in terms of how much credit
    of this type we can afford to grant, and at what price, in order to
    reduce the risk of a quantitative ``miss'' in the Federal Reserve's
    calculation of our required capital.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \8\ 5 Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDIC and Board of
    Governors of the Federal Reserve System: Concentrations in Commercial
    Real Estate Lending, Sound Risk Management Practices, December, 2006.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    b. Liquidity Management
        Having been designated as a Systemically Important Financial
    Institution, Zions Bancorporation is also subject to the Modified
    Liquidity Coverage Ratio. The three primary Federal banking regulatory
    agencies, in implementing the Basel III liquidity framework, jointly
    adopted the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) rule in September, 2014. The
    rule is applicable to internationally active banking organizations,
    generally those with $250 billion or more in total consolidated assets
    or $10 billion or more in on-balance-sheet foreign exposure. At the
    same time, the Federal Reserve went beyond the Basel Committee's LCR
    framework, and adopted a somewhat less stringent rule, the Modified
    Liquidity Coverage Ratio (MLCR), applicable to bank holding companies
    with $50 billion or more in consolidated assets but that are not
    internationally active. This quantitative measurement supplements a
    qualitative liquidity management framework introduced in early 2014 to
    fulfill Enhanced Prudential Standards requirements, including liquidity
    standards, required by section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The MLCR
    requires a bank holding company to hold a narrowly defined portfolio of
    ``High Quality Liquid Assets'' (HQLA) equal to or greater than expected
    net cash outflows over a 21-day period, in accordance with a prescribed
    set of run-off calculations established in the rule. The qualitative
    liquidity management framework requires, among other things, monthly
    internal liquidity stress tests to supplement the prescriptive MLCR in
    determining the size of the institution's required minimum liquidity
    buffer. The full extent of the impact of the liquidity rules on SIFIs
    is almost certainly not fully apparent in the current economic
    environment. We have experienced a prolonged period of low interest
    rates without precedent, and liquidity in the banking system has been
    abundant by virtually any historical measure. But liquidity comes at a
    cost, and the true cost of these rules will become manifest as interest
    rates and liquidity levels eventually normalize. While it is important
    for every depository institution to maintain appropriate levels of
    reserves to deal with normal fluctuations in cash flows, maintaining
    additional liquidity buffers as an insurance policy against times of
    extreme stress is a costly exercise for banks and for the economy at
    large. Every dollar invested in high quality liquid assets is a dollar
    that cannot be loaned out and put to more productive use. In times of
    liquidity stress, the impact will likely be most particularly acute for
    smaller and middle-market businesses that do not have ready access to
    the capital markets, and for whom bank credit is their financial
    lifeblood. As noted earlier. regional banks subject to the MLCR and the
    additional enhanced prudential liquidity standards imposed by the Dodd-
    Frank Act provide a disproportionate share of credit to such
    businesses.
    c. Other Consequences of SIFI Designation
        Since the financial crisis, Zions Bancorporation has more than
    doubled its staffing in areas such as compliance, internal audit,
    credit administration and enterprise risk management. In an effort to
    manage costs, these increases have been accompanied by offsetting
    reductions in other areas of the organization, including many customer-
    facing functions. Many, though not all, of these increases in risk
    management staffing are directly attributable to the Enhanced
    Prudential Standards requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act and other
    regulatory requirements that have arisen in the wake of the financial
    crisis. We have also embarked on an ambitious program to replace core
    software systems, revamp our chart of accounts and establish a data
    governance framework and organization in order to ensure our ability to
    meet the substantial data requirements necessary to fully comply with
    the stress testing and liquidity management protocols applied to SIFIs.
    While we will derive ancillary benefits from modernizing our systems,
    ensuring regulatory compliance has been a significant factor in our
    decision to make these investments which are in the hundreds of
    millions of dollars in size. Additional investments have been made in
    software systems directly related to compliance with the Enhanced
    Prudential Standards. An example is the expenditure of approximately $3
    million for software that facilitates compliance with incentive
    compensation governance requirements. In addition to the software
    investment, thousands of hours have been spent redesigning incentive
    plans and validating their compliance with regulatory requirements. We
    have also spent millions of dollars on the annual production of
    resolution plans, or ``living wills,'' in accordance with requirements
    of the Dodd-Frank Act. This is despite the fact that, like other
    regional banks, we have a simple organizational structure, with a total
    of 20 (mostly very small) subsidiaries, as compared to an average of
    1,670 subsidiaries for each of the Nation's six largest banks.
    IV. Alternative Means of Designating Systemic Importance
        There is no apparent analytical foundation for the Dodd-Frank Act's
    establishment of a $50 billion asset size threshold for the
    determination of an institution's systemic risk. Indeed, there is a
    lack of consistency in applying the Enhanced Prudential Standards of
    Section 165 to all insured depository institutions with over $50
    billion in assets, with the result that some federally insured
    depository institutions with total assets greater than those of my own
    bank holding company are not automatically subject to these rules. For
    example, USAA, a diversified financial services company with $147
    billion in assets, and whose federally insured USAA Federal Savings
    Bank subsidiary has over $70 billion in assets, is not subject to the
    requirements of section 165, since USAA is not a bank holding company.
    Likewise, the Nation's largest credit union, Navy Federal Credit Union,
    with $81 billion in assets, is not subject to these requirements.
        We are supportive of an approach to the determination of systemic
    importance that removes the hard-coded $50 billion asset threshold
    currently incorporated in the Dodd-Frank Act, and that substitutes
    banking regulators' thoughtful and transparent analysis, consistently
    applied, taking into account not only an institution's size, but its
    complexity, interconnectedness with the domestic and international
    financial system, substitutability, cross-jurisdictional activities and
    any other factors the Congress or regulators may deem relevant. We
    believe that any such analysis would find that Zions Bancorporation and
    most, if not all, other regional banking institutions would not be
    found to be systemically important using such an approach, and that the
    net benefit to the U.S. economy from redirecting the resources these
    institutions currently expend on compliance with section 165
    requirements to the prudent extension of credit and other banking
    services to customers would be significant.
    V. Other Regulations That Retard the Ability of Regional Banks To Serve
            Customers and Foster Economic Growth
        There are numerous other regulations as well as instances of
    regulatory guidance, that hamper (or threaten to impair) the ability of
    regional banks to serve the credit and depository needs of their
    customers. These include greatly heightened requirements for compliance
    with Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering regulations and the
    policing of ``our customers' customers''; ambiguous and ever-changing
    rules with respect to Fair Lending and other anti-discrimination laws;
    and, highly prescriptive and evolving rules with respect to the
    governance and oversight of third-party vendor relationships. Two areas
    seem to me to be especially worthy of concern.
        The first pertains to the incredible thicket of regulations that
    has developed around the issuance of residential mortgages. Mortgage
    lending has long been subject to a host of laws and regulations. But
    the additional layers of regulation emanating from the Secure and Fair
    Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008 (SAFE Act), tighter
    appraisal standards at a time when there is a nationwide shortage of
    qualified appraisers, Dodd-Frank's Ability to Repay and Qualified
    Mortgage Standards, and others, has stifled the ability of many banks
    to conduct straightforward mortgage operations with traditional
    mortgage products--even when the resulting mortgage is held in a bank's
    loan portfolio. These issues have been particularly challenging for
    self-employed borrowers. In our own case, the cumulative effect of
    these many rules has dramatically retarded our ability to originate
    mortgage loans in our smaller branches, resulting in a substantial
    reduction in the origination of straightforward fixed rate, fully
    amortizing mortgages in our branch network in recent years.
        A second prospective issue which I believe is deserving of
    Congressional focus arises from outside the traditional bank regulatory
    establishment, in the form of a new accounting standard on the horizon.
    Under the Financial Accounting Standards Board's ``Current Expected
    Credit Loss'' impairment standard, slated to take effect in 2020, banks
    and other SEC registrants will be required to set aside loss reserves
    not only for incurred losses inherent in a loan portfolio, but for all
    expected future losses, as well. This will be a challenging accounting
    standard for all lenders to implement, not least because it requires
    well-documented prognostication about an uncertain future. But the
    impact on the economy, and on borrowers in particular, is likely to
    arise from the fact that this accounting standard may be expected to
    produce the result that lenders will be incentivized to shorten the
    tenor of loans, such that the period over which losses must be
    estimated is shortened, and required reserves are accordingly reduced.
    This would, I believe, provide banks with incrementally more liquid
    balance sheets, and lower reserve requirements. But this will not be a
    good outcome for borrowers, who will become less liquid with shorter
    maturities or face the alternative of higher borrowing costs for
    longer-duration loans. This will not be a positive outcome for capital
    formation, which is critical to economic growth.
        Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to present my
    institution's views on these important subjects.
                                     ______

                        PREPARED STATEMENT OF GREG BAER
                   President, The Clearing House Association
                                 June 15, 2017
        Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, and Members of the Committee,
    my name is Greg Baer and I am the President of The Clearing House
    Association and General Counsel of The Clearing House Payments Company.
    Established in 1853, we are the oldest banking association and payments
    company in the United States. The Clearing House Association is a
    nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to contributing quality
    research, analysis and data to the public policy debate.
        The Clearing House is owned by 25 banks which provide commercial
    banking services on a regional or national basis, and in some cases are
    also active participants in global capital markets as broker-dealers
    and custodians. Our owners fund more than 40 percent of the Nation's
    business loans held by banks, which include almost $200 billion in
    small business loans, and more than 75 percent of loans to households.
    Reflecting the composition of our membership, throughout my testimony,
    I will focus on the effects of regulation on U.S. global systemically
    important banks, U.S. regional banks of all sizes, and the U.S.
    operations of foreign banking organizations with a major U.S. presence.
        After nearly a decade of fundamental and continuing changes to
    financial regulation, now is an opportune time to review the efficacy
    of our current bank regulatory framework. My testimony will focus on
    reforms that could directly and immediately enhance economic growth.
    Certainly, there are many other areas where reform is urgently needed--
    for example, the regulatory regimes for anti-money laundering,
    cybersecurity, the Community Reinvestment Act, and corporate
    governance, as well as a general breakdown in transparent
    administrative procedure at the regulatory agencies--but those involve
    other priorities, and have a more indirect effect on the economy.
        I should emphasize at the outset that if the goal of regulatory
    reform is to prompt economic growth, that goal cannot be achieved while
    excluding regulation of large and regional banks from that effort. As
    the Treasury Department noted in its report this week, community banks
    hold only 13 percent of U.S. banking assets, so reform limited to those
    firms will not have a significant economic impact. And large banks--
    defined as those in holding companies with at least $50 billion in
    assets--originated 54 percent small business loans in 2015 by dollar
    amount and 86 percent by number.
    I. The Case for Reform of Bank Regulation
        Room for reform. The starting point for any review of post-crisis
    regulation is an American banking system that is extraordinarily
    resilient. U.S. banks now hold substantial amounts of high-quality
    capital; since the crisis, the aggregate tier 1 common equity ratio of
    TCH's 25 owner banks nearly tripled to 12.2 percent at the end of last
    year. In absolute, dollar terms, that is an increase in tier 1 common
    equity from $331 billion to over $1 trillion. Similarly, U.S. banks now
    hold unprecedented amounts of high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) to
    ensure that they can survive a period of persistent liquidity stress (a
    run, in other words): today, nearly a quarter of U.S. large bank
    balance sheets consists of cash, U.S. Treasury bonds, and similarly
    low-risk and highly liquid assets.
        Moreover, we now have in place a comprehensive legal and
    operational framework that ensures that even the largest and most
    complex banks can go bankrupt like any other company, without taxpayer
    support and without risk to the broader financial system, ending too-
    big-to-fail and replacing moral hazard with market discipline. Markets
    clearly have recognized as much, as bank holding company debt is now
    priced on the assumption that bondholders will not be bailed out, and
    rather will be bailed in in order to recapitalize the institution. \1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \1\ See The Clearing House eighteen53 Blog, ``The Canard That
    Won't Go Away: Correcting the Record (Again)'' (April 21, 2017),
    available at https://www.theclearinghouse.org/eighteen53-blog/2017/
    april/21%20-%20icba.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        As discussed below, there is considerable evidence that bank
    capital and liquidity levels have now been pushed beyond what is
    reasonably necessary for safety and soundness and financial stability
    purposes. And other restrictions on banking activity have been imposed
    without sufficient analysis or evidence--and without regard to current
    capital and liquidity levels. Here, and generally, when I refer to
    ``banks,'' I am including their nonbank affiliates, which increasingly
    are now subject to the same restrictions (while providers of financial
    services that are not affiliated with banks are effectively
    unregulated).
        Need for reform. While much has been gained in fortifying the
    Nation's largest banks, it is also clear that the banking system is
    playing an unnecessarily diminished role in fostering economic growth
    and vibrant capital markets, and that systemic risk is building up
    outside of the banking system, which has been the sole focus of many
    post-crisis reforms. A key driver here is the recent sea change in
    banking whereby large and regional banks generally no longer allocate
    capital and make business decisions based on their own assessment of
    economic risk, with regulatory capital as a backstop; rather, because
    regulatory capital requirements are so high and prescriptive,
    regulation often dictates how capital--and therefore credit to the
    economy--is allocated. \2\ A similar phenomenon is occurring with
    respect to post-crisis liquidity requirements.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \2\ For example, the recent research by Viral Acharya, et al.,
    finds that banks subject to stress tests have reduced the supply of
    credit to relatively risky borrowers. In particular, the supply of
    credit is reduced to large corporate borrowers that exhibit high risk,
    commercial real estate, credit card, and small business borrowers who
    also tend to be relatively risky. See Acharya, Viral V., and Berger,
    Allen N., and Roman, Raluca A., ``Lending Implications of U.S. Bank
    Stress Tests: Costs or Benefits?'' (May 23, 2017). Available at SSRN:
    https://ssrn.com/abstract=2972919.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        As described in detail below, there are numerous opportunities to
    better align existing capital and liquidity requirements with the goal
    of economic growth--without jeopardizing, and likely enhancing, the
    strength and resiliency of the financial system. Three areas of
    regulatory impact highlight the significant potential for reform.
        Small business lending. As demonstrated in the chart below from the
    recent Treasury report, bank lending has lagged significantly in the
    current recovery.

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Much of the lag is attributable to small business lending. In April
    2017, the Federal Reserve published an inaugural nationwide survey of
    small business credit conditions, the Small Business Credit Survey
    (SBCS), which reports widespread evidence of tight credit conditions
    for small businesses. \3\ In particular, according to the results of
    the SBCS, approximately 36 percent of small businesses reported not
    having all of their borrowing needs satisfied. More specifically:
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \3\ See Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago,
    Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia,
    Richmond, Saint Louis, and San Francisco, ``Small Business Credit
    Survey'' (April 2017), available at www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/
    media/smallbusiness/2016/SBCS-Report-EmployerFirms-2016.pdf.

        About 60 percent of small businesses reported having faced
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
            financial challenges over the past 12 months.

         Of those, approximately 45 percent cited lack of credit
            availability or ability to secure funds for expansion as a
            reason.

         About 75 percent of those firms facing financial
            challenges said they used owners' personal funds to address
            this problem.

        About 45 percent of small businesses applied for financing
            over the past 12 months. Of those that applied for credit, 24
            percent received none of the funds requested and 36 percent
            received only some portion of what they requested.

        Notably, credit availability for small businesses is tighter at
    large banks that are subject to the highest capital and liquidity
    regulations. At these banks, approval rates were just 45 percent for
    small businesses with less than $1 million in revenues. In contrast,
    community development financial institutions and small banks reported
    approval rates of 77 percent and 60 percent, respectively. This fact is
    significant because, as noted, large banks originate a sizable share of
    small business loans that cannot realistically be replaced by smaller
    banks: 54 percent by dollar amount and 86 percent by number of loans.
    \4\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \4\ See The Clearing House eighteen53 Blog, ``Myth Versus Reality
    on Small Business Lending'' (March 24, 2017), available at
    www.theclearinghouse.org/eighteen53-blog/2017/march/24-small-business-
    lending.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Moreover, our own research has shown that the U.S. stress tests are
    constraining the availability of small business loans secured by
    nonfarm nonresidential properties, which accounts for approximately
    half of small business loans on banks' books. Our analysis indicates
    that subjecting a bank to the U.S. supervisory stress tests leads to a
    reduction of more than 4 percentage points in the annual growth rate of
    its small business loans secured by such properties, which translates
    to a $2.7 billion decrease in the aggregate holdings of these small
    business loans each year on average.
        Mortgage lending. Another example of an asset class unnecessarily
    burdened by post-crisis regulation is home mortgage lending, and here
    again, capital regulation is a major driver. As demonstrated in our own
    research, the Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and
    Review (CCAR) stress test is imposing dramatically higher capital
    requirements on residential mortgage loans than bank internal (Federal
    Reserve-approved) models and the standardized approach to risk-based
    capital developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. \5\
    Indeed, for first-lien mortgage loans, CCAR capital requirements are 45
    percent higher than under banks' own projections and 95 percent higher
    than under the Basel III standardized approach. Because smaller banks
    are subject to less stringent capital requirements, they can act as a
    control group in assessing the impact of new regulations on the supply
    of credit. Between the fourth quarter of 2010 and the end of 2016,
    residential real estate loans declined 0.5 percent on average on an
    annual basis at banks subject to the CCAR stress test, while they rose
    4.0 percent on average over the past 6 years on an annual basis at
    banks not subject to that test.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \5\ See The Clearing House, ``The Capital Allocation Inherent in
    the Federal Reserve's Capital Stress Test'', https://
    www.theclearinghouse.org//media/TCH/Documents/TCH%20WEEKLY/2017/
    20170130_WP_Implicit_Risk_Weights_in_CCAR.pdf.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Capital markets. In the United States, much of the lending to the
    private nonfinancial sector and most of the borrowing by the Government
    sector occurs outside the banking system, in capital or money markets.
    Indeed, banks provide only about one-third of credit in the United
    States. Large bank holding companies facilitate financial market
    intermediation both by making markets in securities traded in those
    markets and by providing funding to other market participants who
    transact in those markets.
        Interestingly, post-crisis regulation by banking regulators has
    affected securities markets more than regulation by securities
    regulators. In particular, bank regulations have made it significantly
    more expensive for broker-dealers affiliated with banks--which
    includes, post-crisis, all of the largest dealers--to hold, fund, and
    hedge securities positions. Higher capital charges make holding of
    inventory more expensive, and the Volcker Rule makes holding such
    inventory a potential legal violation. The surcharge for global
    systemically important banks (GSIBs) and liquidity rules make
    securities financing more expensive. It has become more difficult for
    dealers to hedge the risk associated with holding the inventories of
    the bonds using credit default swaps. \6\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \6\ Recent research by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of
    New York has found that CDS have become much more costly to hold in
    large part because of the capital that dealers are required to hold
    against the transaction. Boyarchenko, Nina, Pooja Gupta, Nick Steel,
    Jacqueline Yen, (2016) ``Trends in Credit Market Arbitrage'', Federal
    Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports No. 784, July 2016, p. 18.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The greatest impact has been felt by smaller companies, as the
    capital rules impose lower capital charges on more liquid securities,
    which tend to be issued by larger companies; broker-dealers, forced to
    ration their balance sheets, are serving their largest customers first.
    As shown in the chart below, issuance of corporate bonds by small and
    midsized nonfinancial firms has fallen over the past few years while
    issuance by larger firms has risen.

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        As another example, the efficiency and liquidity of financial
    markets are maintained by the ability of asset managers to take
    leveraged positions in mispriced assets to earn a profit when the asset
    price returns to normal. Such positions are financed in the market for
    repurchase agreements. Broker dealers are often the intermediary
    between two financial institutions, engaging in a repo with one and an
    identical matched repo with another. While such matched transactions
    are nearly riskless, the leverage ratio requirement forces banks to
    hold considerable capital against their reverse repos. Moreover, if the
    net stable funding ratio were adopted as proposed, banks would be
    required to finance the loans with a material amount of longer-term
    funding rather than a matched repo borrowing. As explained in a recent
    TCH research note, these types of requirements make such transactions
    more expensive, and dealers are passing those costs along. \7\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \7\ See The Clearing House, ``Shortcomings of Leverage Ratio
    Requirements'', (Aug. 2016), www.theclearinghouse.org/-/media/tch/
    documents/20160809_tch_research_note
    _leverage_ratio.pdf?la=en.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Thus, more than four-fifths of the respondents to the Federal
    Reserve's Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey in June 2015 indicated
    that liquidity and market functioning in Treasury markets had
    deteriorated. Over 80 percent of those respondents reporting a
    deterioration indicated that the most important cause was a decreased
    willingness of securities dealers to expand their balance sheet for
    market-making purposes as a result of regulatory change.
    II. Reforming Capital Regulation
    A. Stress Testing
        When enough should be enough. Certainly, a key lesson of the
    financial crisis is the critical importance of maintaining capital
    levels sufficient to absorb outsized losses that typically accompany
    periods of financial stress. Responding to that lesson, banks have
    significantly increased the amounts of high-quality capital they
    maintain, and regulators have enacted a range of reforms that require
    these heightened levels of capital to remain in place over time.
        Implementation of Basel III changes has increased the quality of
    capital, focusing on common equity as opposed to hybrid debt/equity
    instruments. In the United States, there is an increased and wise
    emphasis on stressed rather than static measures of capital adequacy--
    in particular, the Federal Reserve's CCAR exercise and the banks' own
    internal stress tests. These are important improvements to the bank
    capital framework that resolve key shortcomings revealed by the
    financial crisis, and we support them.
        Unfortunately, these sensible reforms have been accompanied by
    other changes to the U.S. capital framework which have introduced a
    significant degree of unnecessary opacity, subjectivity and uncertainty
    to capital regulation in the United States. Large U.S. banks today are
    subject to dozens of different capital requirements. Of those, the
    Federal Reserve's CCAR stress test and the enhanced supplementary
    leverage ratio (eSLR) are set at such high levels that they most
    frequently dictate bank's decision making. In addition, U.S. regulators
    have consistently implemented capital reforms in a manner that both
    significantly exceeds agreed-upon international standards and is much
    more stringent than necessary to support safety, soundness, and
    financial stability.
        Of course, a crucial question is how much capital is enough. TCH's
    25 owners hold roughly triple the amount of capital they did pre-
    crisis, but should it be quadruple, or double? We believe three
    benchmarks are useful here. First, consider the results of the Federal
    Reserve's severely adverse scenario under CCAR, which presents for
    large banks a greater economic and market shock than was present in the
    global financial crisis. Then, compare the losses projected under that
    stress scenario to the loss absorbency currently held by those banks,
    as detailed in the following chart.

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        In sum, CCAR imposes a stress scenario significantly harsher than
    the previous financial crisis. \8\ Yet as of 2016 tangible common
    equity was five times the losses implied under that scenario. Total
    loss absorbency--which includes debt holders who would be ``bailed in''
    as part of a bankruptcy under the Title I living will process or the
    Title II Orderly Liquidation Process, was ten times those losses.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \8\ It is worth noting that neither banks nor their regulators
    place exclusive focus on a single scenario; rather, banks run, and the
    Federal Reserve monitors, numerous stress scenarios, including ones
    chosen by each bank to focus on its unique vulnerabilities.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Consider as a second benchmark JPMorgan Chase, which is universally
    considered to have had sufficient capital to have weathered the past
    financial crisis without need for taxpayer assistance, while making two
    acquisitions and continuing to lend and make markets. Thus, one could
    reasonably suppose that the amount of capital it held pre-crisis was
    sufficient (and would have been all the more sufficient if all other
    firms had held that amount as well). Today, JPMorgan Chase holds double
    the capital it did pre-crisis. More importantly, all large banks are
    now required to hold similar levels of capital (with some variation
    based on the size of any GSIB surcharge). And the firms subject to
    those capital rules today include the largest broker dealers--which is
    significant, because pre-crisis, monoline investment banks like Bear
    Stearns and Lehman Brothers were not subject to bank-like capital
    requirements and operated with a fraction of the capital of large
    banks.
        And consider as a third benchmark long-term debt spreads and CDS
    spreads of large U.S. banks, which have remained stable over the past
    five years. While we have not seen a significant financial crisis
    during this period, we observed a large trading loss at one large U.S.
    bank in mid-2012, volatility around the Brexit vote in the United
    Kingdom in the middle of last year, a significant consumer scandal at
    another large U.S. bank in the second half of last year, and more
    generally, a fair amount of international political instability in
    recent months.
        There is also reason to believe that higher capital standards have
    reached levels at which they are having a counterproductive effect. In
    a recent paper, Sarin and Summers (2016) point out that by several
    capital markets-based measures, including stock price volatility and
    CDS spreads, banks appear to be riskier now than they were before the
    crisis, even as bank capital and liquidity standards have been
    substantially raised over that same period of time. \9\ The authors
    conclude that the most likely explanation is that banks' franchise
    values have declined. Specifically, a bank's franchise value depends on
    its ability to generate earnings and increase those earnings over time.
    The tightening of regulations that has occurred since the crisis, while
    increasing loss absorbency, has also reduced the profitability of
    banks.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \9\ See Sarin, Natasha, and Lawrence H. Summers; ``Have Big Banks
    Gotten Safer?'', Brooking Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2016.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        While no one would recommend a return to the low and uneven capital
    levels that existed pre-crisis, or to treating as capital hybrid
    instruments that did not prove to be loss absorbing, the largest U.S.
    banks are now overcapitalized by any objective measure. Hundreds of
    billions of trapped capital is not necessary to meet any quantifiable
    safety and soundness need, and could be redeployed to furthering
    economic growth--either through more lending or returning excess
    capital to shareholders for reinvestment elsewhere.
        Potential for reform. The Federal Reserve's stress testing
    framework attempts to measure the ability of banks to withstand a very
    severe economic downturn (and, where relevant, a market shock). Under
    CCAR, the Federal Reserve runs its own proprietary models to determine
    the effect of various supervisory scenarios on banks' capital
    adequacy--that is, the estimated net losses and resulting reduction in
    capital under those scenarios. After this stress, a large bank must
    meet a series of capital requirements, including a 4.5 percent common
    equity tier 1 ratio. And it must do so assuming that it does nothing to
    shrink its balance sheet, reduce its dividend, or postpone planned
    share repurchases under severely adverse economic conditions--almost
    certainly deeply counterfactual assumptions. Thus, a large bank that
    passes the CCAR exercise not only has sufficient capital to avoid
    failure under historically unprecedented adverse conditions--it has
    enough capital to emerge from such an event doing business as usual,
    and without taking actions that would be normal (or even compelled)
    under the circumstances.
        Stress testing is an important tool for assessing the health of the
    banking system because it incorporates a forward looking, dynamic
    assessment of capital adequacy, and is therefore less reliant on recent
    historical performance. However, the Federal Reserve's CCAR stress
    tests are highly and unnecessarily opaque, relying upon macroeconomic
    scenarios that are never published for public comment and a series of
    unidentified models (combined in unspecified ways) that have never been
    subject to peer review or public comment.
        To the best of our knowledge, which is necessarily limited by the
    opacity of the CCAR process, the accuracy of the Federal Reserve's
    models, individually and collectively, has never been back-tested. The
    results of this nonpublic process continue to differ markedly from the
    results of the banks' own, more robust earnings forecasting models--
    models that the Federal Reserve itself subjects to rigorous review.
    (The bank process is part of what is known as DFAST, short for ``Dodd-
    Frank Act Stress Test''.) At this point, there is no basis to conclude
    that the Federal Reserve's models do a better job of projecting losses
    than the banks' own (Federal Reserve-approved) models.
        Both the quantitative test of CCAR and the qualitative test
    described below also are needlessly complex and consume enormous
    resources at the largest banks, which resources could be more
    effectively redeployed; the CCAR annual submissions for the largest
    banks average in excess of 50,000 pages.
        Effects on economic activity. Collectively, the opacity,
    subjectivity, and overall stringency of the CCAR framework act as a
    significant constraint on lending, economic growth, and liquid capital
    markets. As we have demonstrated in detailed empirical research, this
    is largely the result of the excessively high amounts of capital banks
    are required to hold against their small business lending, mortgage
    lending, and trading book assets to pass the test. \10\ Under banks'
    own DFAST projections, capital requirements for small business loans
    and home mortgage loans are 80 percent and 45 percent higher than under
    the Basel III standardized approach, respectively. For trading assets,
    the higher capital requirements under CCAR are driven by the Federal
    Reserve's prescribed global market shock that is part of the CCAR
    scenarios for banks with large trading operations. However, the market
    shock also applies to the DFAST stress tests that are calculated using
    the banks' own models, and the capital requirement for the trading book
    under CCAR is 20 percent higher than DFAST. \11\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \10\ Capital Allocation in CCAR, supra note 5.
         \11\ See id.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        CCAR's excessively high capital requirements for small business
    loans and home mortgages likely reflect in large part the severity of
    the stress scenario used in the test. The stress test includes
    increases in unemployment that are more sudden in some cases more
    severe than seen in the global financial crisis, and other parameters
    that go beyond any historical experience.
        The inevitable result is that banks are shifting away from
    cyclically sensitive sectors (where loss of employment is likely to
    trigger default) like small businesses and households with less-than-
    pristine credit. Bank behavior is consistent with this set of
    incentives:

        Small commercial real estate loans, which account for
            approximately half of small business loans outstanding on
            banks' books, declined about 2 percent on average over the past
            5 years. \12\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \12\ Capital Allocation in CCAR, supra note 5.

        On the residential real estate lending side, home equity
            lines of credit declined more than 6 percent per year over the
            past 5 years, despite the significant appreciation in housing
            prices, and are about 110 basis points more expensive than they
            were pre-crisis. \13\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \13\ Capital Allocation in CCAR, supra note 5.

        The declines in these categories of lending have been
            larger at banks subject to CCAR than at banks not subject to
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
            CCAR.

        Substantial benefits to economic growth could be achieved through
    three limited reforms to CCAR, all of which would increase banks'
    capacity and propensity to make these types of loans.
        First, banks' more robust, Federal Reserve-approved models should
    be used to estimate stress losses for purposes of the CCAR quantitative
    assessment. The Federal Reserve should use its own, more simplified
    models as a check on the bank models. With the Federal Reserve models
    no longer binding in the first instance, no concentration of risk or
    ``gaming'' concern would prevent their being made transparent. Notice
    and comment or other peer review would doubtless improve their
    accuracy.
        We note that such an approach is not a theoretical construct, but
    current practice at the Bank of England where banks' own models play
    the central role in the United Kingdom's supervisory stress tests. \14\
    Banks use of their own models motivates them to better develop their
    own stress scenarios, which are than more tailored to their business
    models. That said, the Bank of England does not rely entirely on banks
    own models and has its own suite of models for peer-benchmarking and to
    ensure consistency of results across participating banks. In adopting
    the system, the Bank of England has noted that it does not want its own
    models to drive capital requirements at the risk of stifling stifle
    innovation in risk management at banks. More generally, if a set of
    unique models being used is overly conservative, the efficiency of the
    financial system would be reduced. Conversely, if those models are
    vulnerable to a particular source of risk, the entire system could be
    undercapitalized during a period of financial stress. \15\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \14\ See Bank of England (2015) ``The Bank of England's Approach
    to Stress Testing the U.K. Banking System'' (October 2015). Available
    at http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/financialstability/Documents/
    stresstesting/2015/approach.pdf.
         \15\ See Gallardo, German, Til Schuermann, and Michael Duane (May
    2016), ``Stress Testing Convergence'', Journal of Risk Management in
    Financial Institutions 9, pp. 32-45.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Second, annual stress test scenarios should be subject to a 30-day
    public notice and comment period to ensure that they meet the Federal
    Reserve's identified standard--consistency with post-war U.S.
    recessions. While we believe that standard is sensible, it should be
    subjected to notice and comment rulemaking.
        Third, counterfactual and incorrect assumptions about how banks
    would behave in a crisis (e.g., continuing share repurchases and
    balance sheet growth under severe stress) should be corrected.
    B. Leverage Ratio
        A leverage ratio measures the capital adequacy of a bank by
    dividing its capital by its total assets (and, in some cases, off-
    balance-sheet exposures) without taking into account the risk of any
    particular asset or exposure. Requiring the same amount of capital to
    be held against every asset makes the holding of low-risk, low-return
    assets relatively more costly when compared with the holding of higher-
    risk assets, higher-return assets. Put another way, if a capital
    regulation requires a bank to hold the same amount of capital against
    each asset, the bank will by necessity gravitate to relatively higher-
    risk, higher-return assets.
        A leverage ratio can still be a useful tool as a backup measure
    when banks collectively misunderstand the risk of a certain asset class
    (as they did with mortgages and mortgage-related securities in the past
    crisis), but serious problems have emerged for U.S. banks because U.S.
    regulators have set the minimum leverage ratio for the largest U.S.
    banks at nearly double the international standard, without adequate
    analysis of (i) whether such a high leverage ratio is necessary to
    prevent excessive risk taking or (ii) the impact of such a high
    leverage ratio on lending, market activity and economic growth. These
    are the very same banks that provide support to U.S. capital markets
    and ensure the safekeeping of investor assets, and in the course of
    doing so hold large amounts of low-risk, liquid assets like central
    bank placements and Treasury securities.
        More specifically Basel III introduced a 3 percent supplementary
    leverage ratio for internationally active banks, which includes both
    on-and off-balance-sheet assets. \16\ U.S. regulators have not only
    applied this 3 percent supplementary leverage ratio requirement to all
    larger banks, but have also imposed a still-higher requirement for U.S.
    GSIBs--an eSLR of 5 percent at the holding company level and 6 percent
    at depository institution subsidiaries. \17\ Consequently, for several
    of the largest U.S. banks, the eSLR, as opposed to a risk-based
    requirement, that acts as a current or potential future binding
    constraint and therefore affects bank capital and business planning.
    \18\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \16\ See Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, ``Basel III: A
    Global Regulatory Framework for More Resilient Banks and Banking
    Systems'' (June 2011), available at www.bis.org/publ/
    bcbs189_dec2010.pdf.
         \17\ See 79 FR 187.
         \18\ See Federal Financial Analytics, Inc., ``Mutual-Assured
    Destruction: The Arms Race Between Risk-Based and Leverage Capital
    Regulation'' (Oct. 13, 2016).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The overall impact of the leverage ratio as a measure of capital
    adequacy, and the resulting misallocation of capital, have increased
    dramatically in recent years as a result of other regulatory mandates.
    As noted, large banks presently are required by liquidity regulations
    to hold about a quarter of their balance sheets in high quality liquid
    assets (HQLA)--predominantly cash, Treasury securities and other
    Government securities. Large banks now hold approximately three times
    as much of these assets as they did pre-crisis. Those assets rightly
    receive a zero or low risk weight in risk-based capital measures, but
    the leverage ratio completely ignores their actual risk and requires
    banks to hold capital against these assets.
        Banks with sizeable custody, treasury services or other businesses
    that employ a servicing business model or take sizeable corporate
    deposits are particularly affected. In practice, this means that, under
    the liquidity rules, these banks must hold cash or Treasury securities
    against these deposits, on the assumption that up to 100 percent of
    them will run in a crisis (although the outflow rate during the
    financial crisis was substantially lower) and then hold 6 percent
    capital against the same cash and U.S. Treasury bills that the
    regulators require they hold for liquidity purposes. Of systemic
    concern, these problems are likely to become more pronounced in periods
    of financial market uncertainty, as institutional investors seek to
    lower their risk exposure by raising cash and banks must manage the
    resulting deposit inflows in the most conservative way possible, via
    placements at the Federal Reserve and other national central banks.
        Another issue that has received recent notice is how the
    supplementary leverage ratio makes it more costly for U.S. banking
    organizations to provide clearing member services to clients on
    centrally cleared derivatives. While risk-based capital rules allows
    banking organizations to exclude from their denominator any initial
    margin posted by their clients on derivatives transaction--and rightly
    so, as the bank bears no risk of loss on such margin--the leverage
    ratio does not. As a result, the leverage ratio exaggerates the
    exposure amount of these derivatives and effectively requires banks to
    hold un-economic amounts of capital when providing clearing services to
    clients. Because of this, at least three major dealers have exited the
    business. Accordingly, former CFTC Chairman Massad called for the U.S.
    leverage ratio to be amended to take account of segregated margin. \19\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \19\ See Timothy Massad, Keynote Address by Chairman Timothy G.
    Massad before the Institute of International Bankers (March 2, 2015),
    available at www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/opamassad-13.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In sum, under the eSLR, U.S. GSIBs are currently required to trap
    approximately $53 billion in capital against cash reserve balances
    deposited at the Federal Reserve, and an additional $15 billion against
    U.S. Treasury securities. These are assets whose value banks are at no
    risk of misjudging; capital allocated to them could be far better
    deployed to lending or supporting market liquidity. Thus, the answer is
    not to dispense with the leverage ratio but rather to eliminate the
    enhanced supplementary leverage ratio, and to deduct from the
    denominator of the supplementary leverage ratio high-quality liquid
    assets like central bank reserves and Treasury securities, as well as
    segregated client margin.
        It is sometimes said that deducting these assets would begin a
    ``slippery slope.'' This worry is difficult to understand--bank
    regulation is replete with line drawing. For example, the liquidity
    coverage ratio gives 100 percent credit for a central bank reserve or
    U.S. Treasury security as a liquid asset; this has not created a
    ``slippery slope'' whereby loans have been given 100 percent credit as
    a liquid asset. The Bank of England, on July 25, 2016, began deducting
    central bank reserves from the leverage ratio denominator for U.K.
    banks--and no ``slippery slope'' has emerged whereby it has felt the
    need to do so for, say, subprime loans. \20\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \20\ See Bank of England, ``Financial Policy Committee Statement
    and Record From Its Policy Meeting'', July 25, 2016 (August 2016),
    available at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2016/
    062.aspx.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    C. Operational Risk
        Large institutions currently are required to build and maintain
    models to measure operational risk for capital purposes based on a
    Federal Reserve-approved Advanced Measurement Approach. Because it is
    exceedingly difficult to base a capital charge on a subjective
    assessment of the risk inherent in a bank's current operations, these
    models generally look at past large litigation losses and treat them as
    a proxy for the risk of something going wrong in the future.
        In contrast to international peers, the U.S. banks are often
    prohibited from excluding losses from their models even when the bank
    has exited the business line that caused the loss, or sold such
    business to another institution. (The acquirer also assumes the capital
    charge associated with the past event, effectively doubling the capital
    requirement on an aggregate basis.) U.S. banks are prohibited from
    using expert judgment to lower the output of their model even when
    factors make certain operational losses less likely in the future,
    while non-U.S. banks are permitted to make such adjustments. Similarly,
    banks may put in place a range of other risk mitigants, such as
    insurance or hedges, but none of these are meaningfully recognized or
    reflected in the current operational risk capital framework. Finally,
    for some banks, the regulators add to any modeled results a
    ``supervisory overlay,'' which is a completely arbitrary add-on
    presented with no analytical or evidentiary basis.
        As a result of all these factors, operational risk capital charges
    are inflated and extremely sensitive to any data anomalies or extreme
    events. At least one bank was reported in 2014 to be holding over $30
    billion in operational risk capital, \21\ and as a general matter, U.S.
    banks currently hold significantly more operational risk capital than
    their international counterparts. It is also worth noting that
    operational risk losses tend to be idiosyncratic and thus uncorrelated,
    so extraordinarily high capital is being held against a risk that is
    unlikely to be systemic. (Clearly, some operational risks of the
    mortgage business did prove correlated during the financial crisis;
    however, even here, those losses were experienced years after the
    associated credit and market losses.)
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \21\ See Peter Rudegeair, Reuters, ``Trading Scandals, Legal Fines
    May Ramp Up U.S. Banks' Capital Needs'' (June 9, 2014), available at
    www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-oprisk-idUSKBN0EK1M520140609.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        An ongoing Basel Committee review of operational risk capital could
    rectify these problems if an improved regime could be constructed
    appropriately and--importantly--adopted by U.S. regulators without
    ``gold plating.'' The result would be to free up billions of dollars of
    capital for more productive uses.
    III. Reforming Liquidity Regulation
    A. Liquidity Coverage Ratio
        A key lesson of the financial crisis was the need for banks to
    maintain sufficient liquidity to survive periods of financial stress.
    The regulatory response includes Basel III's liquidity coverage ratio
    (LCR), which requires banks to maintain a sufficient stock of liquid
    assets to cover a 30-day run on the bank with no access to additional
    funding, plus a Dodd-Frank Act requirement that large banks conduct
    liquidity stress tests on a monthly basis across at least overnight,
    30-day, 90-day, and 1-year time horizons, and maintain a sufficient
    ``liquidity buffer'' based on their expected liquidity needs under
    these stress tests. These are concrete improvements to the bank
    liquidity framework, which we generally support.
        These regulations have dramatically increased the ratio of HQLA to
    total assets in the U.S. banking sector. The largest 33 banks held 12
    percent of their assets in HQLA in 2008; today they hold 24 percent of
    their balance sheets in these assets. Compared to the onset of the
    crisis, this improvement is even more pronounced, with the proportion
    of HQLA increasing nearly five times since the end of 2006 (i.e., from
    5.75 to 24 percent). \22\ The question, of course, is whether this
    large an expansion of bank balance sheets is necessary, and whether it
    is having unintended effects.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \22\ See The Clearing House, State of American Banking (2016) at
    exhibit 3 (updated).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Although the LCR is conceptually sound, in practice it makes
    assumptions about which liabilities will run, and which assets can be
    sold, that a TCH study shows have no empirical bases and appear
    inconsistent with even crisis-era experience. \23\ For example, while
    the LCR assumes that 30 percent of liquidity lines of credit provided
    to nonfinancial corporations in a future 30-day period of systemic and
    idiosyncratic stress would be drawn, the highest draw on such lines at
    large commercial banks (including several that failed or nearly failed)
    over any month in the financial crisis was 10 percent. While the LCR
    assumes that 100 percent of the nonoperational deposits of financial
    institutions would be drawn, the worst experience during the crisis was
    38 percent. \24\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \23\ See The Clearing House, ``The Basel III Liquidity Framework:
    Impacts and Recommendations'' (Nov. 2, 2011), available at
    www.theclearinghouse.org/-/media/files/association
    %20documents/20111102_liquid_liquidity%20coverage%20ratio.pdf.
         \24\ Id.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        These seemingly arcane calibration errors have major real-world
    consequences. In recent years, U.S. companies of all sizes have
    complained that standby letters of credit are unavailable, or more
    expensive and difficult to obtain. A major reason is because banks must
    assume that in crisis those lines will be drawn in amounts three times
    greater than even the worst historical experience would indicate, and
    therefore hold cash or cash-equivalent assets to fund those draws. And,
    in turn, under the leverage ratio, they must hold significant amounts
    of capital against those riskless or low-risk assets.
    B. Net Stable Funding Ratio
        The net stable funding ratio (NSFR) is intended to establish a
    maximum safe amount of liquidity transformation that a bank can engage
    in by ensuring that banks have sufficient ``sticky'' liabilities to
    fund assets that would be unable to liquidate easily over a 1-year
    horizon. When the NSFR was first proposed by the Basel Committee in
    2009, the metric was designed to ensure that a bank with an NSFR
    greater than 100 percent would be able to weather a 1-year episode of
    idiosyncratic liquidity stress. The NSFR thereby was meant to be a
    complement to the LCR requirement, which was designed to ensure that a
    banking organization could weather a shorter (30-day) but more severe
    period of stress.
        In those initial formulations of the NSFR, the ``extended stress''
    was defined by specific characteristics--for example, ``a potential
    downgrade in a debt, counterparty credit or deposit rating by any
    nationally recognised credit rating organisation.'' That benchmark was
    not included in the final NSFR standard released by the Basel
    Committee, or in the proposed rule to implement the NSFR in the United
    States. Nor was any other benchmark included, making it unclear what
    goal(s) the NSFR is intended to achieve and how it was calibrated.
        Moreover, for U.S. banks already subject to the LCR, uniquely
    stringent liquidity stress testing under the Dodd-Frank Act
    requirements, a Comprehensive Liquidity Analysis and Review and a U.S.-
    only short-term-wholesale funding surcharge as part of the GSIB
    surcharge, it is unclear what additional risk the NSFR would mitigate
    that is not sufficiently addressed by these requirements.
        The NSFR, if implemented, would significantly inhibit economic
    growth and liquid financial markets due to its flawed design and lack
    of transparency with respect to its calibration to ensure its
    efficiency and effectiveness. As demonstrated in our research, The Net
    Stable Funding Ratio: Neither Necessary nor Harmless, over time, the
    NSFR, if implemented in the United States, could be expected to
    significantly limit lending and capital markets activity. \25\ If
    central bank reserve balances and retail deposits shrink in line with
    the Fed's forecast for policy normalization, and banks shift their
    funding toward wholesale deposits in line with historical experience
    many individual banks would not comply unless they took some
    compensating action. In particular, we show that the annual growth in
    bank lending would have to be cut by about 3.5 percentage points, to
    near zero, even to offset only half of the projected decline in the
    NSFR.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \25\ See The Clearing House eighteen53 Blog, ``The Net Stable
    Funding Ratio: Neither Necessary Nor Harmless'' (July 5, 2016),
    available at www.theclearinghouse.org/eighteen53-blog/2016/july/05-
    research-note-nsfr.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    IV. Reforming the Bank Living Will Process
        Title I of the Dodd-Frank Act requires each large bank holding
    company to construct a plan for its rapid and orderly resolution, and
    requires regulators to review the credibility of that plan.
        Regulators have required bank holding companies to file living
    wills on an annual basis, against ever shifting, often nonpublic
    standards, even though the regulators have been generally unable to
    review them and provide feedback within that timeframe. Recognizing
    that section 165(d) of the Dodd-Frank Act requires the submission of
    livings wills on a ``periodic,'' not annual, basis, an appropriate and
    sensible approach is to eliminate the formal requirement for an annual
    submission in favor of submission cycle that is better tailored to the
    objectives of the living will process.
        The Federal Reserve and FDIC also have required, through the living
    will process, substantial amounts of liquidity and capital to be pre-
    positioned--and therefore, trapped--at numerous subsidiaries. The most
    recent living will guidance issued in April 2016 states that bank
    holding companies must assume, counterfactually, that a net liquidity
    surplus in one material entity cannot be transferred to meet liquidity
    deficits at another material entity (even between branches of the same
    banking legal entity). Further, the guidance also requires bank holding
    companies to assume that cash balances held by material entities
    (including branches of the bank) within their primary nostro accounts
    with the main bank entity of the firm are unavailable in a stress prior
    to, and during resolution. The guidance imposes similar requirements
    with respect to pre-positioning of loss absorbing capital resources at
    material entities. None of this guidance has been published for notice
    and comment. Reform here could take the form of a statement that for
    any firm using the single-point-of-entry resolution strategy and in
    compliance with the TLAC requirement for holding company loss
    absorbency, the living will process should not include any incremental
    liquidity requirement at the operating subsidiary level; for all firms,
    we would recommend withdrawing the presumption that liquidity cannot be
    transferred among subsidiaries.
        Currently, each Federal (and State) banking agency is authorized to
    impose its own set of recovery and resolution planning requirements on
    different parts of a banking organization, leading to an unnecessary
    amount of duplicative and at times contradictory requirements. Many of
    these requirements were not subject to a rigorous impact analysis, and
    are not appropriately tailored. This may also reinforce ring fencing of
    entities as bank regulators focus only on the entities for which they
    are responsible.
        We would recommend eliminating the separate insured depository
    institution-level resolution and recovery planning regimes. At a
    minimum, the agencies should be required to coordinate among themselves
    to establish a single set of consistent recovery and resolution
    planning requirements.
    V. Reforming Activity Limitations
        Post-crisis regulation has included not only capital and liquidity
    regulation to reduce the risk of bank failure to the taxpayer and the
    broader system, but also direct limits on bank activities--however well
    capitalized and funded they are. In some cases, these limits are
    unjustified.
    A. Leveraged Lending
        Leveraged lending is an important type of financing for growing
    companies, which tend to carry a lot of debt. Although these companies
    therefore represent a greater repayment risk than more established
    firms, this risk is one that banks have considerable experience
    managing. Banking organizations have long played a critical role in
    arranging, originating, and administering funding for leveraged loans
    as part of their larger role as credit intermediaries. Following the
    financial crisis, capital requirements have increased significantly for
    such loans, as have requirements for modeling their risks.
        Nonetheless, the Federal banking agencies have issued guidance
    setting arbitrary limits on such lending, based on no empirical
    evidence--in particular, any evidence that the capital supporting such
    activity is somehow inadequate. It is a classic example of bank
    regulators substituting their judgment for lenders and markets without
    any meaningful analysis or evidence. For example, regulators require
    banks, in evaluating whether a company is leveraged for purpose of the
    new restrictions, to assume that all lines of credit are drawn, and to
    ignore cash held by the company. As a result, some Fortune 500
    companies with investment grade debt are now deemed by the regulators
    to be highly leveraged, and thus subject to limits on their bank
    borrowing.
        It also appears that this guidance has been supplemented by further
    direction, from examiners to banks, to limit lending activities in the
    area--although the precise details of such direction are unknown as
    they are deemed by the agencies to be ``confidential supervisory
    information,'' and therefore immune to public scrutiny.
        Of course, these loans are subject to capital requirements, and the
    regulators have not identified any flaws in those standards (including,
    in the case of the Federal Reserve, its own CCAR models) that would
    cause these types of loans to be uniquely undercapitalized. Nor have
    the agencies presented any data to show that there is an unhealthy
    concentration of these loans in the banking system. Also, consistent
    with post-crisis behavior in a range of areas, the banking agencies
    have implemented these substantial new limits on bank lending through
    guidance and ``frequently asked questions,'' rather than formal notice-
    and-comment rulemaking and regulation. They have nonetheless deemed the
    guidance binding, and enforced it just as if it were a rule.
        As a result of the leveraged lending guidance and examiner
    pressure, banks have been forced to turn away hundreds of millions,
    perhaps billions, of dollars of loans to growing businesses.
    Furthermore, there is scant evidence that leveraged lending guidance
    and subsequent direction have constrained the risk perceived by the
    Federal banking agencies. Despite any potential concerns regarding
    poorly underwritten or low-quality loans, a bank-centric approach is
    simply shifting risk rather than limiting it, and increasing the cost
    to borrowers, as banks tend to be lower cost providers of credit.
    Recent research by a team of Federal Reserve Bank of New York
    economists illustrates that the guidance has had the effect of reducing
    bank activity in this area, but has also increased nonbank activities,
    demonstrating limited effectiveness from a macroprudential view. \26\
    Notably, those nonbanks do not appear to be experiencing the outsized
    losses that the bank regulators implicitly predicted in forcing banks
    to abandon much of this lending.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \26\ Sooji Kim et al., Liberty Street Economics, ``Did the
    Supervisory Guidance on Leveraged Lending Work?'' (May 2016), available
    at http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/05/did-the-
    supervisory-guidance-on-leveraged-lending-work.html.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        We recommend that the guidance be rescinded immediately and in its
    entirety, which would provide an immediate boost to economic growth as
    a large number of growing companies once again became eligible for bank
    credit.
    B. The Volcker Rule
        Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act (commonly referred to as the
    ``Volcker Rule'') generally prohibits U.S. insured depository
    institutions, U.S. operations of foreign banks and their affiliates
    from engaging in ``proprietary trading'' and sponsoring or investing in
    hedge and private equity funds subject to some limited exceptions,
    including exceptions for customer-related activities such as market-
    making. Prior to the enactment of the Volcker Rule, very few of the
    firms now subject to the Rule engaged in proprietary trading
    activities. Of those that did, many of them were in the process of
    divesting or ceasing their proprietary trading activities. Today,
    trading businesses of covered financial institutions are focused solely
    on serving client needs and hedging the attendant risk.
        The final regulations implementing and interpreting the Volcker
    Rule are voluminous and complex, contained in 964 pages, including an
    893 page preamble. Under these rules, the five U.S. Federal financial
    agencies charged with implementing and enforcing the Volcker Rule have
    interpreted it in a highly restrictive way, with a broad spectrum of
    trading activity (i.e., not only short-term, speculative activities
    that the Volcker Rule was intended to target) presumed to be prohibited
    proprietary trading unless proven otherwise.
        Market-making. Under the rules, a covered banking entity is
    required to go to extraordinary lengths to prove that its routine
    market making and underwriting activities (included related hedging) do
    not constitute ``proprietary trading.'' The agencies have adopted a
    broad definition of proprietary trading with strict requirements for
    permissible activities that could potentially captures legitimate
    market making in less liquid securities, particularly when markets are
    under stress and there is less demand. For example, banking
    organizations are required to strictly limit their inventory to the
    reasonably expected near-term demand of customers or counterparties.
    For debt of smaller companies, which may trade only weekly or even
    monthly (especially during times of stress), banking organizations may
    be required to unduly limit their positions, thus prohibiting them from
    taking any action to stabilize markets.
        Recent research has begun to bear out longstanding reports from
    market participants that the regulations that implement the Volcker
    Rule are inhibiting economic growth and reducing market liquidity by
    constraining the ability of banking groups to buy, sell and underwrite
    securities, including corporate bonds that could help finance the
    operations of corporate customers. A Federal Reserve staff study
    released in December 2016, The Volcker Rule and Market-Making in Times
    of Stress, finds that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased
    after the Volcker Rule, as dealers regulated by the rule have decreased
    their market-making activities. \27\ Other research indicates that with
    many brokers constrained in their ability to hold inventory as a result
    of the Volcker Rule and other post-crisis regulations, the secondary
    market for smaller issuers' debt has tightened. The impact is that
    since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, new debt issuances
    by smaller firms has generally declined. When lower liquidity puts debt
    markets out of reach of smaller firms, it impedes their ability and the
    economy at large to grow.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \27\ See Jack Bao, Maureen O'Hara, and Alex Zhou (2016), ``The
    Volcker Rule and Market-Making in Times of Stress, Finance and
    Economics Discussion Series 2016-102''. Washington: Board of Governors
    of the Federal Reserve System, available at https://doi.org/10.17016/
    FEDS.2016.102.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Notably, Congress specifically exempted market making from the
    Volcker rule. Fault here thus lies not with the statute but the regime
    chosen to implement it.
        Funds. The Volcker Rule also prohibits banks from engaging in
    proprietary or speculative trading by investing in private equity or
    hedge funds, notwithstanding the absence of evidence that such
    investments contributed to the financial crisis or have otherwise
    caused outsized losses. While the agencies must implement the statute
    as Congress has enacted it, they have extended its reach to numerous
    other types of funds that bear little in relation to either private
    equity or hedge funds. This has created enormous and unnecessary
    compliance challenges for institutions with asset management businesses
    serving customers seeking to save and build wealth, as well as for
    market making in a number of asset classes, including securitized
    products, covered bonds, and non-U.S. public funds.
        More specifically, the regulation's overly broad definitions of
    ``hedge fund'' and ``private equity fund'' (so-called ``covered funds''
    under the regulations) include vehicles that are not traditionally
    considered to be hedge funds or private equity funds and require
    extensive analysis and documentation of a banking entity's
    determination of whether a particular vehicle is a covered fund or
    qualifies for an exclusion or exemption. Moreover, the Volcker Rule
    regulations restricts banking entities from engaging in activities that
    could promote lending, capital formation and job creation, through
    investing in vehicles such as certain types of credit funds,
    infrastructure funds, energy funds, real estate funds and REITs. In
    addition, the Volcker Rule, as implemented, makes it difficult for a
    bank-owned asset manager to seed and test new asset management
    strategies for customers as a result of the 3 percent statutory limits
    on ultimate bank ownership after an initial 1-year seeding period, the
    unduly burdensome process for extending the temporary seeding period,
    and the lack of clarity on use of bank assets to fund separate account
    seeding structures under the proprietary trading rules. Making the rule
    more rational through appropriately tailored definitions of ``hedge
    fund'' and ``private equity fund'' and more reasonable ancillary
    requirements would lead to more efficient regulations, promote lending,
    capital formation and job creation, and enhance customer offerings and
    financing opportunities.
        Asset-liability management. Firms use portfolios of liquid assets
    to hedge firm-wide risk. These positions are managed by the corporate
    treasury, not traders in the investment bank; are not short-term
    trading positions; and are not engaged in to benefit from short-term
    price movements. Nonetheless, the regulators have imposed the same
    compliance obligations on this activity.
        Enforcement. Five U.S. Federal financial agencies are tasked with
    examining and enforcing compliance with the Volcker Rule, thereby
    complicating efforts by financial institutions to comply with its
    requirements on an enterprise-wide basis and to receive interpretive
    guidance relating to its restrictions.
        The whole approach to Volcker Rule compliance differs radically
    from the standard supervisory paradigm, whereby firms are charged with
    compliance and subject to enforcement action if they fail to comply.
    Only with the Volcker Rule have the agencies set themselves on a ``pre-
    crime'' mission, performing constant monitoring for compliance.
        This ``pre-crime'' approach is even odder and more unnecessary
    given a GAO report on proprietary trading during the financial crisis,
    which demonstrated that proprietary trading was not a cause of the
    financial crisis. \28\ Given the idiosyncratic nature of proprietary
    trading's losses (and gains), it does not represent a systemic risk,
    and the prudential risks that both trading and fund activities pose are
    now subject to significantly higher capital charges under the Basel 2.5
    and Basel III reforms. Notwithstanding the relatively low demonstrable
    risk profile of the activities in question, the regulations have
    nonetheless implemented a wide-ranging and highly complex set of
    requirements that have and will continue to impair markets and slow the
    real economy. These consequences are only exacerbated by the extra-
    territorial manner with which the agencies have implemented the Volcker
    Rule's restrictions.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \28\ Government Accountability Office, ``Proprietary Trading:
    Regulators Will Need More Comprehensive Information to Fully Monitor
    Compliance With New Restrictions When Implemented'' (July 2011),
    available at www.gao.gov/assets/330/321014.pdf.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Impact on asset-liability management. The risk of proprietary
    trading in a corporate treasury function, where assets are held in
    available-for-sale or held-to-maturity accounts, is remote at best. But
    the Volcker compliance regime is not tailored to the risk that
    proprietary trading will actually occur, and therefore corporate
    treasuries face high burdens in defending business-as-usual activity.
        Needed reforms. Given the breadth and scope of these problems, the
    financial regulators should revise their Volcker Rule regulations to
    establish simpler criteria for identifying what trading and fund
    activities are impermissible and a simpler and more reasonable process
    for conducting examinations and issuing interpretive guidance. They
    should eliminate the regulation's odd presumption that all trading
    activity is illegal unless it can be proven to supervisory
    satisfaction, through detailed analysis and continuous monitoring, to
    meet a laundry list of specific criteria. Proprietary trading can be
    easily distinguished by just a few key features. These regulatory
    changes should be complemented with a shift in the compliance regime
    from real-time enforcement to traditional reliance on bank compliance
    and internal audit functions, with examiners reviewing their results;
    specialized compliance program requirements and unnecessary metrics
    should be eliminated. The result would be a substantial improvement in
    market liquidity and investment in funds that promote capital formation
    and job creation.
    VI. Reforming Supervision, Examination, and Enforcement
        We believe that bank supervision (as opposed to regulation) has
    lost its way post-crisis, and requires a comprehensive reexamination.
    While the link to economic growth in this area is less direct than in
    the others cited, it is very real.
        In sum, three developments have converged to restrict or even halt
    the ability of many banks to open branches, invest, or merge to better
    meet the needs of their customers. First, even as banks have
    dramatically improved their financial condition by increasing their
    capital, liquidity, and asset quality positions, supervisors have
    transformed the supervisory scorecard (the CAMELS rating system) from a
    measurement of financial condition to a measurement of compliance.
    Second, supervisors have adopted a series of unwritten rules that
    produce lower CAMELS ratings. Third, supervisors have adopted another
    series of unwritten, or in some cases written, rules (albeit none with
    any basis in statute) that translate those low ratings and other
    supervisory issues into a bar on expansion. The result is a regime,
    effectively invented by bank supervisors without notice and comment or
    Congressional input, that makes an examiner's expectations regarding
    bank compliance matters a fundamental determinant of whether banks can
    invest and grow.
        For perspective, consider that we routinely see serious compliance
    violations across a wide range of American industries. Those companies
    are subjected to enforcement proceedings and are required to pay fines
    and remediate their practices, but no one ever suggests that while
    those proceedings are pending they should be stopped from opening new
    franchises, building new plants, developing new drugs, designing new
    cars, or launching new apps. Yet somehow we have reached the point in
    banking where the punishment for a compliance problem routinely
    includes, in addition to a vast array of civil and criminal liabilities
    imposed by a wide array of Federal and State authorities (often by
    multiple authorities for the same underlying conduct), a prohibition on
    any type of expansion by the bank. The opportunity lost is not just for
    the bank but for its customers, and ultimately an economy that relies
    on its banking system for financing.
        Of course, banking is different in the sense that bank deposits are
    insured by the FDIC. But that gives Government a special interest in
    the financial condition of banks. As a result, Congress has in limited
    instances linked expansion to financial condition. As we will see,
    though, financial condition is no longer what banks are being graded
    on, and the penalties for a bad grade now vastly exceed what Congress
    has authorized.
        Another result is simply a massive cost, which must be passed along
    to consumers, as described in M&T Bank's most recent annual report
    message to shareholders:

            At M&T, our own estimated cost of complying with regulation has
            increased from $90 million in 2010 to $440 million in 2016,
            representing nearly 15 percent of our total operating expenses.
            These monetary costs are exacerbated by the toll they take on
            our human capital. Hundreds of M&T colleagues have logged tens
            of thousands of hours navigating an ever more entangled web of
            concurrent examinations from an expanding roster of regulators.
            During 2016 alone, M&T faced 27 different examinations from six
            regulatory agencies. Examinations were ongoing during 50 of the
            52 weeks of the year, with as many as six exams occurring
            simultaneously. In advance of these reviews, M&T received more
            than 1,200 distinct requests for information, and provided more
            than 225,000 pages of documentation in response. The onsite
            visits themselves were accompanied by an additional, often
            duplicative, 2,500 requests that required more than 100,000
            pages to fulfill--a level of industry that, beyond being
            exhausting, inhibits our ability to invest in our franchise and
            meet the needs of our customers. \29\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \29\ M&T Bank Chief Executive Office Robert G. Wilmers, 2016
    Annual Report Message to Shareholders (Mar. 9, 2017), available at
    https://newsroom.mtb.com/document-archive/annual-report-letters/2016-
    annual-report-message-to-shareholders.htm.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A. CAMELS Ratings
        The centerpiece of bank supervision is the CAMELS rating system. It
    was created by examiners in 1979 as a scorecard to evaluate an
    institution's ``financial condition and operations''--in other words,
    its safety and soundness. (Interestingly, the creation of the CAMELS
    system was not specifically mandated by any statute or regulation.) The
    CAMELS system evaluates a bank across six categories--Capital, Asset
    quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity, and Sensitivity to market
    risk, especially interest rate risk--and assigns a composite rating,
    all on a scale of 1 (best) to 5. With the sole exception of a few small
    changes in 1996 (most notably, the addition of the ``S'' component),
    the CAMELS standards have not been materially updated in the almost 40
    years since their adoption--not after adoption of the original Basel
    Accord on capital in 1988, the Basel III regime in 2010, the
    Comprehensive Liquidity Analysis and Review in 2012, or the Liquidity
    Coverage Ratio in 2014.
        The result is a system that is hopelessly out of date. Detailed
    capital, liquidity, and other rules have been expressly designed and
    carefully calibrated to evaluate the key components of the CAMELS
    ratings: capital, liquidity, and, less obviously, earnings and asset
    quality, which are now evaluated through stress testing for certain
    banks. Thus, for example, the published standards that examiners apply
    in deciding the capital component of the rating do not include
    consideration of any post-1978 regulatory capital standards--or any
    market indicators, which also have grown in sophistication over the
    past 40 years. There is no mention of CCAR, the self-described
    Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review. Rather, the published
    standards speak vaguely of factors like ``the ability of management to
    address emerging needs for additional capital.'' This is not to say
    that there cannot be cases where a bank that is deemed well-capitalized
    under the current 35-plus different capital tests could not, in theory,
    still require more capital. It is, however, pretty unlikely.
        It is worth examining the predictive ability of CAMELS ratings.
    Consider the number of banks rated as weak (CAMELS 3, 4, or 5 in
    Exhibit 1).

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        This chart seems to demonstrate little predictive ability for
    CAMELS ratings, even when they were focused on financial condition. In
    2007, a small percentage was rated as weak, but hundreds failed.
        Changing the subject: The move from financial condition to
    compliance. The appropriate response to the diminished value of CAMELS
    as a measure of financial condition would have been to decrease its
    importance in the supervisory process or incorporate better measures of
    financial condition. To their credit, the Federal Reserve and other
    banking agencies adopted several crucial post-crisis reforms to improve
    bank resiliency: most notably, CCAR stress testing, Basel III, and the
    LCR. However, exactly because more objective, analytically sound
    standards have overtaken the CAMELS system as a gauge of financial
    condition, examiners have shifted their emphasis to the one entirely
    subjective component: management. And not management as viewed through
    the lens of maintaining sound financial condition, but rather through
    the lens of ``compliance''--not just with laws, but with examiner
    guidance and criticisms too.
        Various ``unwritten rules'' reportedly have been adopted as part of
    this shift:

        All components do not count equally toward the composite
            rating; the management rating counts the most, and it
            increasingly appears that the composite rating cannot be higher
            than the management rating. This elevation of management as the
            ``super component'' has never been subject to public comment. A
            1996 update to the CAMELS standards stated that ``the
            management component is given special consideration when
            assigning a composite rating.'' Over time, it has become the
            dominant consideration.

        The management rating does not depend primarily on the
            financial condition of the bank (because, if it did, it would
            track the other ratings), but rather on compliance with banking
            agency rules and guidance. In practice, any compliance problem
            resulting in enforcement action or penalty, regardless of its
            materiality, can result in a downgrade of management; so, too,
            can unresolved ``Matters Requiring Attention'' (a confidential
            examiner criticism).

        Management ratings increasingly are driven by the results
            of a consumer compliance rating that was adopted as an
            independent evaluation.

        Thus, the examination system has changed from primarily an
    evaluation of the safety and soundness of an institution to,
    increasingly, an evaluation of routine compliance matters and the
    readiness with which management accedes to examiner criticism. And this
    change has been accompanied by a substantial increase in the
    consequences of a low rating, with supervisors raising the stakes
    dramatically. While compliance matters are important, they are not
    uniquely and exclusively important, and should not pollute a system
    designed for an altogether different, and vital, safety and soundness
    purpose.
        Consequences. Bankers now routinely refer to being in the ``penalty
    box,'' where they cannot expand through investment, merger, or adding a
    branch. Mid-size and regional banks are particularly affected. There
    are various ways into the penalty box:

        As described above, a ``3'' rating for management operates
            as a halt on expansion. Under section 4(k) of the Bank Holding
            Company Act, a financial holding company whose bank receives a
            ``3'' rating for management must receive Federal Reserve
            approval to expand certain nonbanking activities. Regulators
            now extend that to almost any type of expansion, or at least to
            any expedited review of branching or other applications.

        Any AML consent order operates as a multiyear ban on
            expansion for any purpose, regardless of the seriousness of the
            conduct motivating the order or the progress made by the firm
            in remediating it. While consent orders bring to mind large
            banks in highly publicized cases, small and midsized banks
            routinely receive such orders.

        A ``Needs Improvement'' CRA rating also operates as a
            multiyear ban, regardless of what triggered it or how it is
            being remediated. While some statutes governing expansion
            require an assessment of management (for example, the Bank
            Holding Company Act, governing bank acquisitions), many do not.
            And of those that do, each speak in particular to ``management
            resources''--presumably, the ability of management to oversee
            an integration--and not compliance issues. Large banks have
            sufficient resources to remediate problems in one area while
            expanding in another area--for example, to remediate an AML
            issue at an overseas subsidiary while opening a new branch in
            the Midwest United States.

        The results of this new supervisory regime are significant:

        Many banks--of all sizes, but particularly midsized banks--
            have been blocked from branching, investing, or merging to meet
            their customers' needs.

        Bank technology budgets often are devoted primarily not to
            innovation but to redressing frequently immaterial compliance
            concerns.

        Board and management time is diverted from strategy or real
            risk management and instead spent remediating frequently
            immaterial compliance concerns and engaging in frequent
            meetings with examiners to ensure that they are fully
            satisfied. Numerous banks report that their boards now spend a
            majority of their time on regulation and compliance.

        Of course, for examiners interested in having their compliance
    criticisms acknowledged and immediately remediated, this system works
    well. But as we note, it is not a tool that regulators in any other
    industry feel they need, and it has important economic consequences.
        Recommendations. A few core reforms are necessary. The first is an
    unequivocal statement that the purpose of a CAMELS rating is to assess
    the financial condition of the bank from the perspective of its
    potential risk to the Deposit Insurance Fund. The second is the
    withdrawal of the Federal Reserve's SR Letter 14-02 and all other
    restrictions on bank expansion that do not have a basis in statute or a
    regulation adopted pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act. The
    third is a complete overhaul of the CAMELS regime (including its
    potential replacement) that emphasizes clear, cogent, and objective
    measures of financial condition over vague, arbitrary, and subjective
    ones.
    B. Tailoring of Enhanced Prudential Standards
        As we have described above, post-crisis regulatory reforms have
    established a myriad of new prudential requirements for banking
    organizations. The scope of application varies by requirement, but in
    many cases new regulations have been applied in a uniform fashion to
    large and diverse cohorts of banks of differing sizes, business models
    and risk profiles. For example, the Federal Reserve has implemented a
    number of so-called ``enhanced prudential standards'' under section 165
    of the Dodd-Frank Act (including capital, liquidity, and other
    requirements) on the basis of asset size thresholds.
        While the Federal Reserve has made some effort to tailor its
    enhanced prudential standards (e.g., by providing for a modified LCR
    for some firms and recently eliminating the CCAR qualitative assessment
    for others), it has generally done so based on arbitrary size
    thresholds rather than careful consideration of the scope and type of
    regulation warranted by different business models, risk profiles and
    other more meaningful criteria. And in many cases, the Federal Reserve
    has established one-size-fits-all rules that are not tailored at all.
    The result is insufficiently tailored regulatory regime for many banks
    that imposes unnecessary burdens and unduly limits their ability to
    lend to and otherwise support businesses and consumers. There is
    therefore a clear need to review all enhanced prudential standards
    established under section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act in order to
    identify and implement more appropriate and robust tailoring of their
    scope and extent of application; doing so would better enable banks
    unduly and unnecessarily burdened by the current regime to lend and
    otherwise serve customers and the economy.
    C. Regulation of Foreign Banking Organizations
        Generally outside the notice of policymakers, foreign bank
    operations in the United States have decreased somewhat in recent
    years.
        Certainly, one cause of this retrenchment has been a delay in
    foreign banks' recapitalization post-crisis, global economic
    instability, and a general need to reduce balance sheet size. However,
    U.S. requirements have been another key driver, as recent years have
    also seen extensive revision to the rules and regulations governing
    foreign banking organizations (FBOs) that have U.S. operations. In
    particular, the Federal Reserve has required that, on the basis of
    asset size thresholds, many FBOs operating in the United States
    establish intermediate holding companies (IHCs) through which their
    U.S. activities must be operated and managed. These IHCs in turn are
    now subject to a wide range of new prudential requirements, including
    capital, liquidity, stress-testing, resolution planning and other
    rules. The resulting regime is one that is simply not appropriately
    tailored to the varying sizes, business models, and risk profiles of
    different types of FBOs and the inherently sub-consolidated nature of
    their U.S. operations.
        For example, the stand-alone capital and liquidity requirements
    applied to the U.S. IHC of an FBO effectively hinder the foreign
    parent's ability to allocate capital and liquidity across its entire
    global business. All internationally active banks (whether foreign or
    domestic) manage their capital and liquidity on a consolidated, global
    basis, oftentimes acting nimbly to allocate financial resources to
    geographic locations or business operations where it is needed in a
    time of stress. Stand-alone U.S. capital and liquidity requirements
    effectively trap those resources in the FBO's U.S. IHC, making them
    unavailable for use elsewhere. The U.S. regime, which also mandates
    stress testing at the IHCs, ignores (and duplicates) similar
    consolidated requirements imposed on the FBOs by their home country
    authorities. And of course, for the various U.S. capital and liquidity
    rules that are applied to the U.S. IHC of FBOs, the general concerns
    and recommendations that we have highlighted earlier in this paper are
    just as relevant, and apply equally.
        On top of these capital, liquidity, and stress test requirements,
    the Federal Reserve also has required foreign GSIBs to ``pre-position''
    extraordinarily high amounts of internal TLAC. This stands in contrast
    to the process described in the FSB's term sheet on TLAC, which the
    Federal Reserve developed in coordination with foreign supervisors;
    that process identifies a range of potential internal TLAC
    requirements, with the precise requirement to be established on an
    institution-specific basis through collective dialogue among that
    institution's home and host country supervisors. Instead, the Federal
    Reserve imposed internal TLAC requirements at the top end of the FSB
    range, unilaterally. Here, too, the result is insufficiently tailored
    regulatory regime for many FBOs that imposes unnecessary burdens and
    unduly limits their ability to lend to and otherwise support businesses
    and consumers.
    VII. Conclusion
        Our banking system now stands on a solid foundation of capital and
    liquidity. That foundation affords us the opportunity to consider
    whether particular components of the regulatory and supervisory regime
    are unnecessary, duplicative or more stringent than necessary to
    achieve safety and soundness and financial stability goals.
    Considerable economic benefits can be achieved through such a
    reexamination.
                                     ______

                   PREPARED STATEMENT OF ROBERT R. HILL, JR.
    Chief Executive Officer, South State Corporation, on behalf of Mid-Size
                           Bank Coalition of America
                                 June 15, 2017
        Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, and Members of the Committee,
    I am Robert Hill, CEO of South State Corporation, which is the holding
    company of South State Bank. South State, founded in 1933, is
    headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, and serves communities in
    South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. In January of this year,
    our bank passed the $10 billion in assets threshold, which subjects
    South State to unduly burdensome requirements under the Dodd-Frank Act.
    In light of this experience, I appreciate the opportunity to present
    the views of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA) on the
    significant compliance burden placed on midsize banks as a result of
    Dodd-Frank.
        The MBCA is the voice of 78 midsize banks in the United States with
    headquarters in 29 States. MBCA member banks are primarily between $10
    billion and $50 billion in asset size, average less than $20 billion,
    and serve customers and communities through more than 10,000 branches
    in all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories.
    Midsize banks most often are the largest, local bank serving
    communities, many for more than a century.
        Unlike the largest banks in the country, for whom lending is
    largely automated, midsize banks are run by people who are focused on
    establishing long-term relationships with our communities and our
    customers on a daily basis. As a result, we are able to use actual
    knowledge of our customers and base our credit decisions on intangible
    factors, such as character and local economic conditions. We have also
    made the necessary risk and compliance investments that support our
    business models, which are uniformly based on stable deposit funding,
    revenues driven by traditional banking activities well-understood by
    bank management and regulators and limited or no trading operations or
    market-making activity. In sum, midsized banks have prudent business
    models that contribute to economic growth and support financial
    stability. To the extent restraints can be reduced, midsized banks can
    provide even more credit and support to small businesses and Main
    Street.
        Under Dodd-Frank, crossing the $10 billion in assets threshold has
    harsh implications for midsize banks. When banks cross $10 billion,
    they are considered midsized institutions--a designation that
    introduces an enhanced supervisory approach from regulators. These
    banks can expect more frequent compliance requirements, which may
    include full-scope examinations coupled with regular, targeted reviews.
    In connection with these additional burdens, midsize banks must
    allocate further resources to compliance, from business units to senior
    management and the board of directors.
        The imposition of these demands does not benefit the public in any
    appreciable way. These requirements drain resources of midsize banks,
    and less money is thus available to provide credit to individuals and
    small businesses in our communities. For example, as a result of this
    threshold, South State incurs costs over $20 million per year.
        In April of this year, the MBCA submitted a letter to the Chairman
    and Ranking Member urging the Committee to revisit the $10 billion
    number, an arbitrary figure that does not meaningfully capture systemic
    risk. In addition to the unfair consequences of using this number that
    already exists, the MBCA is deeply concerned the figure could become
    the default threshold for even more rules and regulations in the
    future.
        The MBCA's highest priority would be to eliminate the $10 billion
    threshold and replace the number with an activities-based standard,
    which would focus regulation more closely on systemic risk, or, at a
    minimum, to raise the threshold to an appropriate level. The key
    sections of Dodd-Frank, which will need to be amended in this regard,
    are Sections 165, 1025, 1026, and 1075.
        As an example, Section 165 imposes a mandatory stress testing
    burden on banks between $10 billion and $50 billion, known as the Dodd-
    Frank Annual Stress Test (DFAST). Former Federal Reserve Governor
    Daniel Tarullo testified before Congress that such testing is not
    necessary, and, in fact, it is actually a burden on the regulators with
    no commensurate regulatory benefit. As CEO of an institution that
    recently passed the $10 billion threshold, I can personally attest to
    the significant compliance burden that follows and the cost that it
    entails.
        Independent Bank of Texas, an MBCA member bank with assets of just
    under $10 billion, estimates the cost of implementing the mandatory
    stress testing required under Section 165, in the event it crosses the
    $10 billion threshold, would be $5-6 million in the year of
    implementation and $2-3 million per year thereafter. Independent Bank
    has stated they will have to add a team of three to four people to
    manage this process.
        All of this cost would be for something Governor Tarullo has
    testified provides no regulatory benefit. In addition, the current
    regulatory regime imposed by Section 165 forces midsize banks to divert
    capital away from the products we offer and the lending that drives
    growth and development in our communities. The MBCA believes freeing
    midsize banks from the unreasonable burdens posed by Section 165 should
    be one of your highest priorities.
        To this end, we applaud Senators Moran, Tester, and Heitkamp for
    sponsoring S.1139, the Main Street Regulatory Fairness Act, which would
    remove the DFAST mandate currently imposed on banks between $10 billion
    and $50 billion in assets. As Senator Tester noted, ``This bill cuts
    red tape and makes it easier for Main Street lenders to invest in
    entrepreneurs, families buying their first home and parents sending
    their kids to college.''
        The MBCA also applauds Senators Tester and Moran for introducing
    the CLEAR Relief Act of 2017, which would provide the Qualified
    Mortgage protections to loans originated and held in portfolio by banks
    under $10 billion. The MBCA, however, strongly urges the Committee, as
    it moves this legislation forward, to not limit this important relief
    to banks under $10 billion. The rationale for the Qualified Mortgage
    protections relates to the fact the banks with the status are holding
    the mortgage loans in portfolio. It has nothing to do with the size of
    the institution holding the mortgage. Using the arbitrary $10 billion
    figure once again reinforces this number with no rational basis.
        In our market, we have a lot of retirees, who do not have jobs. As
    a result, they do not meet the QM status requirements. If we are
    keeping the mortgages on our books, we believe we should be given QM
    status. Otherwise, it is not just the bank that is impacted, but our
    consumers are unfairly limited in their choices.
        Former House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, one of the
    principal authors of Dodd-Frank, has testified that he supports giving
    a safe harbor status on loans where the lender retains the risk by
    holding the loan in portfolio. A loan made by a bank and held to
    maturity is the strongest possible statement of confidence in the
    ability of the borrower to repay regardless of the size of the bank.
        We have only raised two examples where the $10 billion figure
    currently imposes--or may impose--an unnecessary burden on midsized
    banks. But there are a variety of thresholds that need to be
    eliminated, replaced by an activities-based standard or, at a minimum,
    raised substantially to capture systemic risk. This is not simply about
    fairness to midsize banks. It is fundamental to growing our economy.
        Recently, the MBCA asked its member banks to submit examples from
    their customers of specific, real-world customer impacts from the
    current regulatory system. The examples received included everything
    from mortgages rejected because of the ability to repay/qualified
    mortgages requirement to business loans not made. These examples have
    one thing in common--the absence of economic activity due to
    unnecessary regulatory requirements, which results in limited to no job
    creation and growth.
        As Main Street banks, we support a regulatory regime that
    encourages prudent behavior and protects our customers. But we also
    need common-sense regulation that does not unnecessarily impose burdens
    and impede the banking services communities need to create jobs and
    drive economic growth--and this, in our view, requires a move away from
    the Dodd-Frank $10 billion regulatory threshold. I am happy to answer
    any questions the Committee may have, and again appreciate the
    opportunity the Committee has given the MBCA to express its views.
                                     ______

                     PREPARED STATEMENT OF SAULE T. OMAROVA
                      Professor of Law, Cornell University
                                 June 15, 2017
        Dear Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, Members of the
    Committee: Thank you for inviting me to testify at this hearing. My
    name is Saule Omarova. I am Professor of Law at Cornell University,
    where I teach subjects related to U.S. and international banking law
    and financial sector regulation. Since entering the legal academy in
    2007, I have written numerous articles examining various aspects of
    U.S. financial sector regulation, with a special focus on systemic risk
    containment and structural aspects of U.S. bank regulation. For 6 years
    prior to becoming a law professor, I practiced law in the Financial
    Institutions Group of Davis Polk & Wardwell and served as a Special
    Advisor on Regulatory Policy to the U.S. Treasury's Under Secretary for
    Domestic Finance. I am here today solely in my academic capacity and am
    not testifying on behalf of any entity. I have not received any Federal
    grants or any compensation in connection with my testimony, and the
    views expressed here are entirely my own.
        The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has left a deep, crippling
    mark both on the American economy and on the lives of millions of
    Americans who lost their homes, their jobs, their savings, and their
    hopes for a better future. It threw the country into a prolonged
    economic recession, accompanied by growing levels of poverty,
    inequality, and political discord. According to an estimate by the
    Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the crisis resulted in an economy-wide
    output loss of up to $14 trillion, or $120,000 per single U.S.
    household--both of which amounts will easily double if the broader
    economic and societal effects of the crisis are permanent. \1\ These
    output losses triggered a familiar vicious circle of economic
    stagnation and instability. Faced with steadily declining real incomes,
    Americans are forced to finance their consumption with an increasingly
    unsustainable debt, which already reached a record $13 trillion mark.
    \2\ Debt overhang depresses consumer spending, which in turn leads to
    further contraction in production and employment. \3\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \1\ David Luttrell, Tyler Atkinson, Harvey Rosenblum, ``Accessing
    the Costs and Consequences of the 2007-09 Financial Crisis and Its
    Aftermath'', DallasFed Economic Letter, Vol. 8, No. 7 (Sept. 2013),
    available at https://www.dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2013/el1307.cfm,
    at 1-2.
         \2\ See, Matt Scully, ``Trumps' America Is Facing a $13 Trillion
    Consumer Debt Hangover'', Bloomberg.com (6 June 2017), available at
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/trump-s-america-is-
    facing-a-13-trillion-consumer-debt-hangover?srnd=157391092.
         \3\ See, Robert Hockett and Richard Vague, ``Debt, Deflation, and
    Debacle: Of Private Debt Write-Down and Public Recovery'' (2013),
    available at https://www.interdependence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/
    04/Debt-Deflation-and-Debacle-RV-and-RH1.pdf.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Furthermore, neither economists' estimates nor the actual
    statistics capture the enormous nonpecuniary--or human--costs of the
    crisis, including the lasting psychological effects of unemployment,
    underemployment, diminished job security and reduced opportunity. While
    difficult to quantify, these ``hidden'' costs of the financial crisis
    will be borne by the American people for years to come.
        Yet, the very same financial institutions whose reckless profit-
    seeking created the crisis in the first place were largely protected
    from the downside of their own excessive risk-taking, because the
    Federal Government was compelled to bail them out. Not only did the
    2008-09 bailouts effectively exact ``an unfair and nontransparent tax
    upon the American people'' but they also significantly undermined
    public trust in the American capitalist system, thus undermining the
    system itself. \4\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \4\ Luttrell et al., supra note 1, at 3.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In this context, the Committee's current efforts to evaluate the
    role of financial institutions in fostering America's economic growth
    acquire particular significance. Promoting sustainable, stable long-
    term growth is an issue of enormous political as well as economic
    importance. It is the only way of remedying pervasive socially
    destructive consequences of the financial crisis: only by deliberately
    and systematically channeling public and private efforts toward the
    expansion of productive capacity and employment in the real (i.e.,
    nonfinancial) sector of the national economy can we reverse the
    crippling effects of the extraordinary wealth transfer from the
    American taxpayers to the financial industry that the latest crisis
    laid bare for all to see. There is hardly a greater task facing
    Congress today, and the Committee's decision to tackle it is a much
    needed act of public-minded statecraft.
        Ironically, however, the financial industry is using this
    opportunity to mount a massive lobbying effort to achieve the opposite
    goal: to reverse key post-crisis regulatory reforms enacted with an
    explicit goal of curbing financial institutions' ability to generate--
    and then socialize--excessive levels of risk in the financial system.
    The industry explicitly targets the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and
    Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (the ``Dodd-Frank Act'' or the
    ``Act''), the centerpiece of post-crisis financial regulation reform.
    \5\ In effect, banks are trying to put the Dodd-Frank Act on trial
    under the rhetorical guise of ``fostering economic growth.'' It is,
    however, a dangerous misconception to equate economic growth with
    financial sector deregulation: not only are the two phenomena
    fundamentally different but, as explained below, they are often
    mutually exclusive.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \5\ Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of
    2010, Pub. L. No. 111-203, 124 Stat. 1376 (2010) (codified at 12 U.S.C.
    5301 et seq. (2012)).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        It is especially ironic--indeed, astounding--to watch the financial
    industry complain about its supposedly unbearable regulatory compliance
    costs, when the industry is doing exceptionally well for itself. All
    banks and their parent-companies, regardless of size, saw their profits
    increase steadily during the entire time after the Dodd-Frank Act was
    passed in 2010. In 2016 alone, banking institutions earned a total of
    $175 billion in net profits. \6\ This is not a sign of a struggling
    industry.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \6\ The total number for 2016 is the sum of the revenant quarterly
    numbers. See, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, ``Quarterly Trends for
    Consolidated U.S. Banking Organizations'', available at https://
    www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/banking--research/
    quarterlytrends2016q4.pdf?la=en.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Of course, it may be reasonable, and even desirable from the public
    policy perspective, to revisit the continuing efficacy of certain post-
    crisis laws and regulations or to recalibrate their application to
    certain small, low-risk financial institutions. If carefully designed
    and thoughtfully implemented, such recalibration may help to increase
    the availability of affordable local financing to small businesses in
    some rural and small-town areas. However, even under the best of
    circumstances, that possibility alone is not sufficient to support a
    wide-ranging repeal or rollback of the existing financial laws and
    regulations. Any such measure would directly and disproportionately
    benefit large, complex, systemically risky megabanks by removing all
    meaningful constraints on their ability to destabilize the Nation's
    financial system and, once again, jeopardize American taxpayers' long-
    term (and even short-term) well-being. It is against this background
    that the Committee should evaluate every proposal for regulatory reform
    submitted to it by self-interested industry players.
    I. Financial Deregulation Is Likely To Hinder, Not Foster, Real
            Economic Growth
        The starting point of all deregulatory proposals and arguments
    advanced by the financial industry is a blanket assertion to the effect
    that financial institutions' core, if not sole, business purpose is to
    finance America's economic growth. Accordingly, the argument goes, any
    regulatory constraint on financial institutions' business activities,
    by definition, restricts their ability ``to serve customers, grow the
    economy and create jobs.'' \7\ Therefore, an implicit conclusion
    follows, removing such regulatory constraint will necessarily and
    automatically improve customers' lives, boost the economy, and create
    jobs.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \7\ Letter to The Honorable Michael D. Crapo and The Honorable
    Sherrod Brown from Francis Creighton, Executive Vice President of
    Government Affairs of Financial Services Roundtable (Apr. 14, 2017)
    [the ``FSR Letter''], at 1.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        It is an inherently faulty argument, insofar as these financial
    institutions--regardless of their size or other attributes--are
    privately owned firms whose overarching business priority is to
    maximize their own profits and shareholder returns, not the Nation's
    macroeconomic goals. It becomes a deliberately misleading and dangerous
    argument, however, when used by large financial institutions the bulk
    of whose profits comes from massive secondary-market trading and
    dealing operations.
        The financial industry's argument either inadvertently conflates or
    deliberately confounds two very different things: (1) actual growth in
    the real economy, and (2) mere speculation-driven asset price inflation
    in the secondary markets.
        It is indisputable that what America needs is real economic growth:
    stable and sustainable long-term growth of the real--i.e.
    nonfinancial--sector of the national economy. We urgently need to grow
    our Nation's industrial output and capacity, to facilitate employment-
    and wealth-generating technological advances, to rebuild and modernize
    the country's physical and social infrastructure. We also need to
    ensure that the benefits of these real growth-promoting activities are
    distributed more equally and fairly, so as to restore the lost strength
    of America's middle class and to enable lower-income American families
    to move up the ladder of economic and social success. It is this kind
    of real, sustainable, structurally balanced, and socially inclusive
    economic growth that is necessary in order to help the country recover
    from the post-crisis economic recession.
        It is also fundamentally different from the mere asset price
    inflation, or growth in prices at which various already existent
    assets--stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, etc.--are traded in
    secondary markets. Because increases in market value of such tradable
    assets at least temporarily increase their owners' individual wealth,
    the aggregate growth in the market value of all such assets is
    routinely and erroneously taken as a direct indicator of the aggregate
    economic ``wealth'' or national economic ``growth.'' Of course, an
    increase in the current market price of a particular company's stock
    may reflect, at least in part, an increase in that company's real-life
    productivity. But it may also reflect merely the generalized
    expectations of today's stock buyers that those prices will be even
    higher tomorrow. In that sense, all asset price inflation is inherently
    speculative: it is not directly or necessarily linked to actual
    productive gains in the real economy. \8\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \8\ ``The Fundamental Logic of Speculative Manias and Crashes Has
    Been Explained and Documented Many Times''. See, Charles P.
    Kindleberger and Robert Aliber, ``Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A
    History of Financial Crises'' (2005); Erik Gerding, ``Law, Bubbles, and
    Financial Regulation'' (2013).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Moreover, speculative asset price inflation, in fact, significantly
    impedes real economic growth. There are two reasons why that is the
    case.
        First, by making purely speculative investments financially
    attractive, asset price inflation effectively diverts investment flows
    away from the primary markets in which companies raise new capital for
    expanding their productive capacity. Put simply, investors looking to
    put their money to use in financial markets face two competing choices:
    asset price speculation (an easy short-term commitment of capital with
    virtually no ``hard'' constraints on the upside) or productive
    investment in the real economy (a long-term commitment of capital with
    various real-life constraints on potential returns). In that sense,
    asset price inflation actively undermines the real economy's potential
    for productive, employment-generating growth that America so
    desperately needs.
        Second, asset price inflation creates instability that directly
    threatens the economy's ability to operate and grow. When speculation-
    induced asset price inflation reaches its peak, the inevitable market
    crash tends to be fast and furious. During these dramatic moments,
    markets tend to over-correct, sending asset prices far below the levels
    supported by the ``fundamentals.'' Thus, the ultimate bursting of an
    unsustainable speculative bubble wipes out not only the artificial,
    purely speculative gains in asset values but also a lot of real
    economic wealth. Massive defaults, bankruptcies, business closures,
    worker layoffs, and other familiar symptoms of a severe ``market
    correction'' extinguish both the fruits of the Nation's past and the
    foundations of its future economic growth and prosperity.
        To appreciate these dynamics, one need not go as far back as the
    Great Depression and the Roaring Twenties that led to it. More recent
    history provides plenty of evidence to the same effect.
        In the era of massive financial sector deregulation, throughout the
    1990s and all the way until 2008, America's economic boom was based
    largely on secondary-market asset price inflation. This trend is
    particularly visible in the period after the enactment of the Gramm-
    Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (the ``GLB Act''), which repealed the Glass-
    Steagall Act's prohibition on combining, under the same corporate roof,
    traditional banking activities and full-blown dealing and trading in
    securities and other financial (and even nonfinancial) markets. \9\
    Throughout the 1990s, large financial institutions--both commercial
    banks and investment banks--lobbied for this ``regulatory relief'' from
    the supposedly outdated Glass-Steagall rules, using the familiar
    rhetoric of ``facilitating economic growth'' and providing ``more
    choices'' and ``better services'' to their customers.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \9\ Financial Services Modernization Act (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act),
    Pub. L. No. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338 (1999).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Once enacted, the GLB Act unleashed an unprecedented consolidation
    in the financial services industry and the emergence of a handful of
    extremely large FHCs that began aggressively growing their large-scale
    trading and dealing operations in securities, derivatives, short-term
    money-like instruments, and physical commodities. \10\ Their core
    banking operations, while still a critical point of access to public
    subsidy, quickly lost their status as the ``core'' source of
    profitability. \11\ In the short 9 years between the enactment of the
    GLB Act and the near-collapse of the financial markets in the fall of
    2008, these universal megabanks have effectively turned into universal
    dealers making secondary markets in everything and anything that could
    be quantified and turned into a trading asset. A result of this
    unprecedented growth of secondary market speculation was an equally
    unprecedented asset price inflation--a story aptly told by many an
    expert already.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \10\ See, Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr., ``The Dark Side of Universal
    Banking: Financial Conglomerates and the Origins of the Subprime
    Financial Crisis'', 41 Conn. L. Rev. 963, 1002-46 (2009).
         \11\ See, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, ``Quarterly Trends for
    Consolidated U.S. Banking Organizations'', Fourth Quarter 2016,
    available at https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/
    banking-research/quarterlytrends2016q4.pdf?la=en, at 13.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        For present purposes, however, one point deserves special emphasis:
    As secondary market trading volume, stock price indices, and financial
    firms' profits were all going up, domestic industrial production
    declined, manufacturing jobs were massively outsourced overseas, wages
    stagnated, and consumer debt (itself converted to a ``securitized''
    trading asset) ballooned. In effect, this ``financialization'' of the
    American economy represented an unprecedented transfer of wealth from
    the real economy to the increasingly speculation-oriented financial
    sector. \12\ The systematic redistribution of wealth from the Main
    Street makers to Wall Street takers was starkly exposed when the
    speculative craze--particularly, in mortgage-backed securities,
    underlying mortgage loans and houses--finally triggered the world's
    first truly systemic financial crisis. \13\ To protect the economy from
    collapse, American taxpayers were forced to bail out the same megabanks
    that fueled--and profited from--the crisis-inducing asset price
    inflation. Today, financial institutions are doing very well, in terms
    of profits and returns on their shareholders' equity. \14\ But the
    middle class and poor Americans, whose livelihood is tied to the real
    economy, continue to bear the full burden of the sluggish post-crisis
    recovery.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \12\ See, Thomas Philippon, ``Finance Versus Wal-Mart: Why Are
    Financial Services So Expensive?'' Rethinking the Financial Crisis 235
    (Alan Blinder et al., Eds. 2012).
         \13\ See, Saule T. Omarova, ``The New Crisis for the New Century:
    Some Observations on the `Big-Picture' Lessons of the Global Financial
    Crisis of 2008'', 13 N.C. Banking Inst. 157 (2009).
         \14\ According to official statistics, the top 50 largest BHCs'
    total net income for the last quarter of 2016 was over $32B, while
    their average annualized return on equity was above 7 percent.
    Tellingly, the total quarterly income of just the top six BHCs--
    JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co.,
    Citigroup, The Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley--was over $24B.
    Three of these largest institutions had annualized return on equity of
    almost 11 percent. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Trends
    for Consolidated U.S. Banking Organizations, Fourth Quarter 2016,
    available at https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/
    banking_research/quarterlytrends2016q4.pdf?la=en, at 36.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The centerpiece of post-crisis regulatory reform, the Dodd-Frank
    Act, aims to minimize the likelihood of recurring speculative asset
    price inflation. Thus, the Dodd-Frank Act established a new systemic
    oversight body, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). \15\
    The Act mandated enhanced prudential supervision of so-called
    ``systemically important financial institutions'' (SIFIs), which
    includes large bank holding companies (BHCs) with at least $50 billion
    in assets and certain nonbank financial institutions designated as
    SIFIs by FSOC. \16\ As part of such enhanced prudential supervision,
    SIFIs are required to maintain higher capital and liquidity buffers,
    conduct regular stress tests, and prepare and submit to regulators
    comprehensive resolution plans (living wills).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \15\ 12 U.S.C. 5321.
         \16\ 12 U.S.C. 5323; 5325.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Among other things, these heightened requirements are designed to
    limit the ability of large financial conglomerates to create dangerous
    levels of risk through their massive dealing and trading operations in
    secondary markets. By restricting SIFIs' ability to fuel destabilizing
    asset price inflation, the Dodd-Frank regime of enhanced prudential
    supervision also helps to channel investment away from socially
    destructive speculation (secondary markets) and toward productive
    investment in the real economy (primary markets). While it is not
    commonly perceived or discussed in these terms, this potential
    ``channeling'' effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on real economic growth
    should not be underestimated. Put simply, if investors find fewer
    lucrative opportunities in speculative assets trading, they will direct
    more of their money into nonspeculative investments.
        It is, therefore, no surprise that large financial conglomerates--
    Wall Street megabanks that dominate and profit from secondary market
    trading and dealing activities--are now asking Congress to reverse all
    of the major post-crisis regulatory reforms that threaten their ability
    to promote speculative asset price inflation. Rhetorically, these
    financial institutions are deliberately using the language of
    ``fostering economic growth'' and ``creating jobs,'' ostensibly through
    lending to ``small businesses'' and ``American families.''
    Strategically, they are taking advantage of the fact that many smaller
    BHCs, regional lenders without meaningful trading operations, voice
    their own, qualitatively different, concerns about the unintended
    consequences of applying SIFI regulation to their more traditional
    banking-based business models. Neither of these clever tactics should
    sidetrack the Committee in its deliberations on how to foster
    sustainable, stable growth in the real economy, as opposed to mere
    speculation in secondary markets.
    II. The Financial Industry's Deregulatory Proposals Will Not Foster
            Real Economic Growth
        The financial industry has submitted numerous letters and proposals
    for deregulatory reforms that would ostensibly promote economic growth.
    A comprehensive or detailed analysis of all such letters and proposals
    would make my testimony unwieldy. Instead, I will focus on the
    industry's key deregulatory proposals targeting the Dodd-Frank's regime
    of enhanced prudential supervision, including the process of SIFI
    designation and supervisory stress testing. While these proposals offer
    clear potential benefits from the standpoint of financial institutions'
    own profitability and stock price (at least in the short run), the
    financial industry failed to establish how the proposed deregulatory
    measures would promote sustainable long-term growth of the American
    economy.
    A. Rolling Back Enhanced Prudential Regulation Will Promote
            Speculation-Driven Asset Price Inflation, Not Real Economic
            Growth
        The financial industry's proposals nearly uniformly try to make a
    case that one of the key impediments to creating American jobs and
    fostering economic growth is the Dodd-Frank Act's explicit focus on
    systemic risk prevention. This argument targets the FSOC's general
    authority to designate SIFIs, the process and criteria for application
    of enhanced prudential standards, the substance of such standards, and
    the Federal regulators' ability to exercise discretion in implementing
    their statutory oversight responsibilities. The principal justification
    for this sweeping attack on the core features of the post-crisis
    regulatory regime is that it increases individual financial
    institutions' costs of compliance, compared to their pre-crisis
    regulatory compliance costs.
        This line of argument lacks merit.
        Every regulation, by definition, increases regulated firms' costs
    of doing business: such costs may include both the direct expenses of
    complying with regulations and the foregone profits from the prohibited
    or restricted activities. Child labor laws, environmental regulations,
    anti-fraud rules all raise costs of doing business for those private
    firms that stand to profit from activities the society deems
    undesirable. The mere imposition, via regulation, of additional private
    costs is not an ``unintended consequence'' that must be avoided: it is
    the principal mechanism of protecting the public from potential harm
    caused by profit-seeking private actors.
        The appropriateness of additional private costs of regulation,
    therefore, must be weighted not against pre-regulation private costs
    but against potential public costs likely to accrue in the absence of
    regulation. None of the financial industry's proposals offer any
    discussion, let alone quantification, of the full public costs of
    rolling back the Dodd-Frank regime of systemic oversight. In that
    sense, while styled as public policy proposals, these are merely
    requests for special private benefits.
        The rhetoric of ``promoting economic growth'' is meant to mask this
    fundamentally self-interested nature of the financial industry's
    requests for deregulation. As discussed above, removing prudential
    restrictions on large financial institutions' risk-taking will hinder,
    not promote, the kind of real economic growth that the American people
    so urgently need. It will spur precisely the kind of secondary market
    speculation and asset price inflation that enriches Wall Street
    megabanks and further decimates America's real productive capacity.
        Notably, all of the financial industry's proposals to roll back
    Dodd-Frank's enhanced prudential regulation use the same basic
    rhetorical device: they frame the issue as a clear binary choice
    between ``arbitrary'' and ``tailored'' rules. They claim that existing
    SIFI determination criteria (in particular, the $50B asset size
    threshold for treating BHCs as SIFIs), the Federal Reserve's
    supervisory stress tests, and even the long-standing CAMELS rating
    system are ``arbitrary'' and should be either repealed or replaced with
    something that is ``appropriately tailored'' to each financial
    institution's ``unique'' business and risk profile. \17\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \17\ See, e.g., Letter to The Honorable Michael D. Crapo and The
    Honorable Sherrod Brown from The Clearing House (Apr. 14, 2017) [the
    ``TCH Letter''].
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        It is not my goal in this testimony to engage in any technical
    disputes regarding any specific capital requirements or stress test
    methodologies. My comments go to the overarching misconception that the
    industry actors' concerted (possibly coordinated?) use of the false
    dichotomy--``arbitrariness'' vs. ``tailoring''--engenders.
        ``Tailored'' SIFI Determination Is a Path to Eliminating SIFI
    Oversight
        Generally, setting a specific numeric threshold as a jurisdictional
    device--i.e., a criterion for subjecting a particular person to a
    particular set of legal rules--is not ``arbitrary,'' per se. We all
    live with a myriad of such fundamentally ``arbitrary'' but practically
    necessary threshold-based rules every day: the legal age for voting is
    18, the legal age for drinking is 21, the individual income tax rates
    are drawn on the basis of specified income thresholds, and so on. What
    would happen if we removed all such numerical thresholds as
    ``arbitrary'' and replaced them with ``tailored'' determinations
    seeking to establish with complete precision every single person's
    ``unique'' individual ability to exercise voting rights, consume
    alcohol, or pay income taxes? In theory, it could make everything
    better. In practice, however, it would create a far more arbitrary,
    unpredictable, and chaotic world in which nobody will be able to
    anticipate--or assess the fairness of--the ``uniquely tailored''
    treatment they receive under voting, drinking, or tax laws. It would
    also require an enormous amount of Government resources to provide
    sufficiently individualized and ``appropriately tailored''
    determination of every person's many legal rights and obligations. The
    sheer cost to the public of giving everyone their own ``tailored'' law
    will far outweigh any private costs of having to live with
    ``arbitrary'' but universally applicable and clearly drawn boundaries.
        This simple common-sense logic should be applied to evaluating the
    financial industry's request to replace the Dodd-Frank's $50B size
    threshold for treating BHCs as SIFIs with an ``indicator-based'' regime
    of specific case-by-case designation. Midsize banks worried about
    approaching the $50B threshold in the future and regional banks that
    already qualify as SIFIs based on their asset size are especially keen
    to see this part of the Dodd-Frank repealed and replaced.
        Reasonable people may disagree and argue about whether the current
    size threshold--$50 billion in assets--is the right one, or whether a
    higher or a lower number would be more socially beneficial. On the one
    hand, as midsize and regional banks argue, their traditional lending-
    based business model does set them qualitatively apart from Wall Street
    megabanks with massive and systemically risky trading and dealing
    activities. The fact that the top six megabanks' size is measured in
    trillions of dollars further underscores that difference. On the other
    hand, $50 billion is by no means an insignificant number. Only 38 BHCs
    currently exceed that threshold. It is also instructive to remember
    that, in the 1980s, savings banks and thrifts--small, local traditional
    lenders squeezed by competitors--made very similar pleas for regulatory
    relief. The resulting S&L crisis showed that hasty deregulation of
    small lending-oriented financial institutions may create significant
    risks to the system. \18\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \18\ See, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, ``The S&L Crisis:
    A Chrono-Bibliography'', available at https://www.fdic.gov/bank/
    historical/sandl/.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        These complexities notwithstanding, the existing regime should not
    be simply replaced with an ``indicator-based'' system under which the
    FSOC would be forced to go through a tedious and inevitably contentious
    exercise of determining whether any particular BHC's scope, scale,
    nature, and mix of activities warrants a SIFI designation. While this
    ``flexible'' and ``individually tailored'' approach may sound good in
    theory, it will significantly undermine the entire post-crisis
    regulatory framework for safeguarding systemic stability. There are
    three main reasons why that is the case.
        First, mandating an individualized SIFI determination procedure for
    each potentially systemically significant BHC will impose an enormous,
    and completely unnecessary, financial and organizational burden on
    FSOC, Federal Reserve, and other regulators. The sheer costs of the
    ``tailored'' designation process--hiring and training dedicated
    personnel and devoting countless amounts of regulators' time and energy
    to gathering and processing huge amounts of information, most likely
    over BHCs' constant objections and complaints--will threaten to derail
    the entire regime of SIFI oversight. It is nearly a certainty that this
    costly and time-consuming process will effectively preclude both FSOC
    and the Federal Reserve from exercising their statutory
    responsibilities as systemic regulators. Notably, financial
    institutions advocating this measure deliberately ignore these public
    costs of giving them their own, individually ``tailored'' supervisory
    regime. Nor do they undertake to cover all of the additional regulatory
    costs of the ``tailored'' SIFI designation process.
        Second, individually ``tailored'' SIFI designation will immediately
    become vulnerable to the financial industry's other favorite line of
    attack as being inherently unpredictable, unclear, and nontransparent:
    in other words, ``arbitrary.'' The very nature of the complex inquiry
    into various qualitative indicators of systemic riskiness of an
    individual financial institution is bound to open FSOC to potential
    allegations of misjudgment, misinterpretation, and misbehavior. The
    MetLife saga provides a vivid example of that tactic. Given what is at
    stake for large BHCs, the odds of FSOC being constantly embattled and
    ultimately incapacitated are unacceptably high. Instituting
    individually ``tailored'' SIFI designation process will virtually
    ensure the next round of industry lobbying, aiming to eradicate the
    very notion of enhanced SIFI supervision as ostensibly nonadministrable
    in practice.
        Third, there is significant danger that loosening the SIFI
    designation process, primarily to accommodate the demands of midsize
    and regional banks and BHCs, will pave the way for large Wall Street
    megabanks to seek additional deregulatory measures specially
    ``tailored'' to enable them to expand their lucrative secondary-market
    trading and dealing operations. While such activities are precisely
    what creates unsustainable levels of risk in the financial system, it
    will be much more difficult for lawmakers and (already significantly
    weakened) regulators to resist what will likely be framed as simply
    ``further tailoring'' of supervisory rules.
        Attacks on ``Arbitrary'' Stress Testing Are Attacks on Supervisory
    Discretion
        Ironically, even as the financial industry ostensibly wants FSOC to
    exercise individualized judgment instead of applying ``arbitrary''
    generalized rules in the context of SIFI designation, the same industry
    vehemently attacks the exercise of individualized judgment--or
    supervisory discretion--by the Federal Reserve in the context of
    supervising SIFIs. The key target of this attack is the post-crisis
    regime of supervisory stress testing.
        The largest megabanks appear particularly determined to limit the
    Federal Reserve's ability to conduct meaningful Comprehensive Capital
    Analysis and Review (CCAR), mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act. Among other
    things, they seek to

        subject the Federal Reserve's annual stress test scenarios
            to a 30-day notice and comment period under the Administrative
            Procedure Act;

        restrict the Federal Reserve's ability to use its own
            independent assumptions in constructing test models;

        mandate advance publication of the Federal Reserve's stress
            test models for ``peer review;''

        restrict the use of the Federal Reserve's own models merely
            to a ``supervisory assessment'' of banks' own models; and

        eliminate CCAR's qualitative assessment for all banks. \19\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \19\ See, TCH Letter, supra note 17.

        If implemented, these industry-advocated changes will effectively
    nullify the CCAR regime. The principal reason for subjecting SIFIs to
    both internal and supervisory stress tests is to create a reliable
    early-warning mechanism for identifying potential weaknesses in the
    firm's capital planning and management. Forcing the Federal Reserve to
    disclose ahead of time its stress test models will enable financial
    institutions ``to manage to the test,'' thus defeating the whole
    purpose of stress testing. Moreover, subjecting its test scenarios or
    modeling methodologies to public notice and comment will inevitably
    create unnecessary delays in the implementation of stress tests. It
    will impose potentially prohibitive additional costs on the Federal
    Reserve, burdened with the duty to respond to numerous industry
    comments and criticisms. Finally, relegating the Federal Reserve's
    models to a mere back-up reference function will render the entire
    exercise inherently unreliable.
        In sum, what the financial industry is advocating here is not a
    ``more robust and transparent'' stress testing process, but a de facto
    sidelining of the Federal Reserve by forcing it to surrender its key
    supervisory function to SIFIs themselves. Doing so will significantly
    endanger the country's financial stability and increase the likelihood
    of another systemic crisis. Accordingly, it will hinder, not promote,
    America's long-term economic growth.
    B. There Is No Evidence That Financial Deregulation Is Necessary To
            Foster Economic Growth
        Financial institutions' deregulatory proposals claim that the post-
    crisis regime of enhanced prudential oversight directly prevents them
    from extending more loans to small businesses and struggling American
    families. They routinely assert that the more stringent capital
    requirements and the higher costs of regulatory compliance are the
    principal, if not the sole, reason why banks cannot increase their
    financing of productive economic enterprise.
        Constant repetitions of this blanket assertion are intended to
    condition the audience--including the Members of this Committee--to
    associate the rollback of Dodd-Frank (something the financial industry
    wants) with the creation of domestic manufacturing jobs (something the
    American people need). It is calculated to propagate dangerous
    confusion about the real causes of financialization, ongoing erosion of
    America's industrial base, rising poverty and inequality, and other
    social and economic ills of the last several decades. In essence, the
    industry wants us to believe that forcing Citigroup and Bank of America
    to finance just 5 percent of their multi-trillion-dollar high-risk
    assets with common shareholder equity is the root of all of the
    Nation's economic woes.
        This is an incredible claim. There are three main reasons why it is
    fundamentally false:

        First, capital regulation does not reduce banks' cash
            available for lending: that notion is based on a fundamental
            misunderstanding of what bank capital is.

        Second, banks are not short of cash necessary to expand
            their lending: banks' soaring profits and record dividend
            payments in recent years show there is plenty of cash they
            could, but choose not to, lend out.

        Third, there is no evidence that banks are striving to
            increase lending that would foster the economic growth: the
            industry offers no proof (beyond simple assertions) that
            individual banks' asset allocation decisions are driven, in any
            meaningful way, by their desire to raise the rate of growth in
            the real economy. In the absence of such evidence, banks'
            deregulatory demands should not be taken as bona fide proposals
            to foster America's long-term economic growth.
        Enhanced Capital Levels Do Not Restrain Availability of Credit
        Higher capital requirements have nothing to do with reducing money
    available to banks for lending and productive investment. Capital is
    not cash in the vault. It is merely an accounting concept, the amount
    of shareholder equity on a bank's balance sheet: i.e., amount
    contributed by the bank's shareholders and not borrowed from depositors
    and other creditors. \20\ Banks do not ``hold'' capital in the same way
    as they ``hold'' cash or gold--and in the exact same way as Exxon-Mobil
    or Microsoft are never said to ``hold'' their shareholder equity.
    Capital is simply what the owners of the corporation would receive if
    the corporation liquidated all of its assets and repaid all of its
    debts. In that sense, capital is a critical equity cushion that
    protects corporations'--including banks' and BHCs'--creditors from
    losses. It is only because financial institutions' creditors are
    explicitly or implicitly protected from such losses by the Federal
    Government that banks and BHCs are allowed to operate with much thinner
    equity cushions than would be sustainable in our free capitalist
    market. \21\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \20\ For a discussion of bank capital and a compelling argument
    that capital requirements should be much higher than they are
    presently, see Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, ``The Banker's New
    Clothes'' (2013).
         \21\ See id.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        It is therefore nonsensical to claim that reducing this creditor-
    protecting, loss-absorbing equity cushion will somehow ``free up cash''
    for bank lending--and, specifically, for lending to small businesses
    and credit-needy Americans. How much a bank is willing or able to lend
    is a complex asset allocation decision that is driven primarily by
    considerations of bank's own profitability: ``Should we extend a long-
    term loan to a risky small startup, or should we use that money to
    increase our fee revenues from short-term derivatives trading?'' The
    impact of this decision on the bank's regulatory capital ratios or
    stress test results may be an important factor in its choice between
    lending and trading, but only insofar as it affects--indirectly and in
    combination with many other factors--that bank's overall profits.
        In other words, capital regulation constrains banks' (individually
    rational) propensity to choose ``high risk, high return'' assets and
    limits their ability to maximize shareholder profits by jeopardizing
    creditors. These regulatory capital constraints, however, still leave
    plenty of room for banks to choose whether to finance productive
    economic enterprise or to channel money into secondary market
    speculation. To the extent the latter increases short-term shareholder
    returns, it remains a potentially more attractive choice. The largest
    banks' massive shift into secondary market trading and dealing,
    especially after the passage of the GLB Act, aptly illustrates that
    dynamic.
        If Congress grants these largest banks' demands to weaken existing
    capital requirements, supervisory stress testing, and other elements of
    enhanced prudential regulation and supervision, it will affirmatively
    sanction virtually unconstrained growth in the volume and speculative
    riskiness of banks' trading and dealing activities, not traditional
    ``small-business'' lending. That, in turn, will spur precisely the kind
    of speculation-driven asset price inflation that threatens the
    stability of the American financial and economic system and undermines
    the country's long-term economic growth.
        Banks Are Not ``Short of Cash'' for Lending
        According to the FDIC statistics, the U.S. banking industry has
    fully recovered from the crisis and is doing exceedingly well. Thus, in
    the first quarter of this year, nearly 96 percent of all U.S. insured
    depository institutions were profitable; their average return on equity
    stood at a healthy 9.37 percent; and their total quarterly income
    reached $44 billion, which is 12.5 percent higher than a year earlier.
    \22\ Insured banks' total net income in 2016 exceeded $171 billion.
    \23\ BHCs are also turning handsome profits. For example, in the last
    quarter of 2016, the total quarterly income of just the top six BHCs--
    JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co.,
    Citigroup, The Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley--exceeded $24
    billion. \24\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \22\ Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, ``Statistics at a
    Glance'', As of March 31, 2017, available at https://www.fdic.gov/bank/
    statistical/stats/.
         \23\ FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, Fourth Quarter 2016,
    available at https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/qbp/2016dec/qbp.pdf,
    at 7.
         \24\ Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Trends for
    Consolidated U.S. Banking Organizations, Fourth Quarter 2016, available
    at https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/
    banking_research/quarterlytrends2016q4.pdf?la=en, at 36.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        These profits directly increase banks' and BHCs' shareholder
    equity--the capital cushion that is a subject of so many of the
    industry's complaints--and are easily available for use in their
    lending or other growth-promoting activities. However, it appears that
    a big chunk of these profits is instead being distributed to the
    banking institutions' shareholders, in the form of cash dividends and
    share repurchases. Thus, in 2016, federally insured banks alone
    returned to their shareholders $103 billion in cash dividends, \25\ a
    number second only to the record high of $110 billion in cash dividends
    they paid in 2007, the last full pre-crisis year. \26\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \25\ FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, Fourth Quarter 2016,
    available at https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/qbp/2016dec/qbp.pdf,
    at 7.
         \26\ FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, Fourth Quarter 2007,
    available at https://www5.fdic.gov/qbp/2007dec/qbp.pdf, at 5.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        By any measure, $103 billion is an enormous amount of money that
    could be used both (1) to increase banks' total loss-absorbing and
    risk-reducing regulatory capital cushion, and (2) to finance small
    family-owned businesses, entrepreneurial startups, medium-size
    industrials, aspiring students, and struggling families. In other
    words, using $103 billion of banks' profits to increase lending to
    productive economic enterprise would advance both (1) the public
    interest in having a safer and more efficient system of credit
    allocation, and (2) the banks' self-professed interest in fostering
    economic growth and creating American jobs. Yet, banks chose not to go
    that socially beneficial route.
        It is astonishing to see that, after voluntarily sending all that
    money to shareholders, the banking industry complains that the
    additional cost of complying with post-crisis regulations ``takes
    capital away from small business loans, home purchases and other
    productive uses.'' \27\ ``Every dollar spent on hiring compliance
    attorneys,'' the argument goes, ``is potentially $10 dollars of loans
    that could be made to improve someone's economic opportunity.'' \28\ As
    the dividend numbers cited above show, every dollar diverted away from
    banks' regulatory compliance would most likely improve only bank
    shareholders' and managers' ``economic opportunity.'' In fact, using
    the same mathematical logic, it follows that, in 2016 alone, banks have
    willingly deprived the real economy of a whopping $1.03 trillion in
    ``small business loans, home purchases and other productive uses.''
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \27\ FSR Letter, supra note 7, at 2.
         \28\ Id.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        It is not my contention that banks should never declare shareholder
    dividends. The key point here is that bank dividend payouts expose the
    fundamental falsity of the industry's claims to the effect that
    excessive regulatory costs deplete banks' resources and prevent them
    from financing real economic growth. Banks have plenty of extra money
    for expanding their lending. They choose not to lend that money,
    instead ``returning capital'' to their shareholders. That is because
    stable and high dividends increase individual banks' stock prices,
    which directly benefits not only bank shareholders but also their
    executives and managers. Higher stock price translates directly into
    higher bonuses. Higher volume of small-business lending does not.
        This basic fact about banks' use of available capital may explain
    why these institutions--particularly, the largest Wall Street
    megabanks--are waging such an adamant campaign against CCAR, ``living
    wills,'' and other key elements of the Dodd-Frank's systemic risk
    prevention regime. Under the current regime, SIFIs' ability to pay
    shareholder dividends or repurchase their own shares is expressly
    conditioned on supervisory approval, based in part on the results of
    the latest stress tests. Not meeting supervisors' expectations,
    therefore, limits their ability to pay dividends and depresses their
    stock price. It is telling, for example, that securities analysts and
    investment advisers have been buzzing about Citigroup's and Bank of
    America's recent and expected future hikes in dividend payouts after
    both of these firms performed better in the CCAR tests. \29\ As one
    expert put it, ``The ability to pay dividends is currently a hallmark
    of strength in the sector.'' \30\ Accordingly, deregulatory rollback of
    the Federal Reserve's stress testing and other prudential regulations
    is expected to enable Citigroup, Bank of America, and other SIFIs to
    raise their dividends and share repurchases, thus lifting the value of
    their stock. \31\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
         \29\ See, Gemma Acton, ``These Three U.S. Bank Stocks Are My Top
    Sector Picks'', CNBC.COM (22 Mar. 2017), available at http://
    www.cnbc.com/2017/03/22/these-three-us-bank-stocks-are-my-top-sector-
    picks-analyst.html; Rebecca Keats, Bank of America Declares a Quarterly
    Dividend, Marketrealist.com (31 Jan. 2017), available at http://
    marketrealist.com/2017/01/bank-of-america-declares-a-quarterly-
    dividend/; Stone Fox Capital, Citigroup: ``Expect Another Big Dividend
    Hike To Move Stock'', Seeking Alpha (4 Jan. 2017), available at https:/
    /seekingalpha.com/article/4078558-citigroup-expect-another-big-
    dividend-hike-move-stock.
         \30\ Stone Fox Capital, supra note 29.
         \31\ Id.; Keats, supra note 29.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Thus, it appears that market experts have no confusion about the
    real benefits of massive financial deregulation: it will increase
    banks' profits, dividend payouts, and stock prices. Whether or not it
    will also promote the country's long-term economic growth does not seem
    to be part of the conversation.
        There Is no Evidence That ``Fostering America's Economic Growth''
    Is a Meaningful Factor in Banks' Business Decisions
        It is, of course, possible that, while returning massive amounts of
    capital to shareholders, banks and BHCs are nevertheless genuinely
    dedicated to their self-declared mission of financing America's real
    economic growth. Rather than take their word for it, however, the
    Committee should require specific, robustly documented and empirically
    supported, evidence that that is indeed the case.
        For example, the Committee should ask each financial institution
    asking for regulatory relief to provide specific, quantified, and fully
    documented answers to the following questions:

        What was your institution's specific (i.e., quantified)
            annual contribution to the growth of your local, regional, and/
            or national economy, in the period between 2010 and 2017 (after
            the enactment of Dodd-Frank)? What was it in the pre-Dodd-Frank
            period between 2000 and 2009?

        How much additional annual contribution to the growth of
            your local, regional, and/or national economy would your
            institution have made, but was prevented from making directly
            as a result of [insert a specific regulatory provision of the
            Dodd-Frank regime]?

        In each year since 2010, what was the aggregate amount of
            commercial and industrial (C&I) loans that your institution
            refused to extend, solely because of [insert a specific
            regulatory provision of the Dodd-Frank regime]?

        Does your institution have an enterprise-wide strategy for
            facilitating domestic job-creation and promoting the growth of
            your local, regional, and national economy? What are the core
            elements of that strategy?

        How often does your institution's Board of Directors and
            top management discuss the institution's performance in
            implementing that strategy?

        This type of targeted inquiry would help to (1) establish the
    credibility of the financial industry's claims; and (2) discover the
    real link, if any, between financial institutions' deregulatory agenda
    and the country's real economic growth. Presently, none of the
    financial industry's numerous deregulatory proposals establish that
    link, relying instead on purely declarative rhetoric. They then demand
    effective removal of key regulatory safeguards against systemic
    financial crises, solely on the strength of that rhetoric. Assessing
    the public costs and benefits of any such deregulatory proposals,
    however, requires ascertaining that such steps are actually--and not
    just rhetorically--going to generate substantial growth in the
    country's real economy.
        It is unlikely that any financial institution will be able to
    produce satisfactory answers to any of these questions. As private
    shareholder-owned firms, these institutions' primary concern is their
    own profitability, not the overall performance of the American economy.
    They simply do not track, and are not equipped to track, the relevant
    macroeconomic data: measuring and worrying about such data is the
    Government's responsibility, an inherently public task. That means that
    determining what should be done to spur America's economic growth--and
    whether relaxing any of the existing financial regulations should be a
    part of that endeavor--is also an inherently public responsibility. The
    financial industry's attempts to usurp or sidetrack the process of
    public deliberation on such an important matter should therefore be
    subjected to intense scrutiny.
    III. Broader Structural Solutions Are Needed To Channel Capital Into
            Productive Economic Activity and Sustainable Growth
        The Dodd-Frank regime of systemic oversight and enhanced prudential
    supervision of SIFIs correctly aims to limit potentially destabilizing
    speculation and asset price inflation in secondary markets. To the
    extent it strengthens the resilience and stability of our financial
    system, it lays down an important foundation for the Nation's long-term
    economic growth. However, simply limiting the opportunities for
    diverting capital into speculative trading is not sufficient to spur
    and sustain such growth in practice. It is equally important to ensure
    that a significantly greater share of available financial capital is
    actively and consistently flowing into long-term productive investment.
    In other words, it entails cultivating new sources of, and creating new
    avenues for profitably deploying, truly ``patient'' capital.
        Abundant patient capital is what enables construction of large-
    scale physical and social infrastructures, supports transformative R&D
    projects, generates productivity gains, and creates sustainable well-
    paying jobs throughout the Nation. By the same token, the chronic
    shortage of patient capital--and persistent glut of speculative
    capital--is the key reason for the sluggishness of America's real
    economy today.
        Incentivizing investor ``patience'' on the scale needed to spur the
    Nation's long-term economic growth, however, is a difficult task that
    cannot be reduced simply to a few deregulatory or tax-relief measures.
    Nor can it be left to the private sector alone. Private investors' time
    horizons and risk tolerance levels are inherently limited by the finite
    nature of their economic resources and their biological lifespan. It is
    fundamentally rational for private investors to prefer shorter-term
    investments, which entail less unforeseeable future risk and promise
    returns within such investors' reasonable lifetime horizons. Private
    investors' short-term bias, therefore, is not a deviation from market
    rationality; it is a built-in feature of such rationality.
        Overcoming investor short-termism and facilitating the formation of
    ``patient'' capital requires new, more effective forms of public-
    private partnership. The public component of such partnership will
    bring into the investment process a number of unique advantages that
    public instrumentalities enjoy when they act as market participants:
    their vast scale, high risk tolerance, lengthy investment horizons, and
    direct backing by the full faith and credit of the United States.
    Combining these unique capacities of a public investor with private
    investors' informational agility, superior knowledge of local
    conditions, and market expertise will help to channel both private and
    public resources into the critical growth-inducing projects. This new,
    patient public-private capital will finance the building of new roads,
    bridges, high-speed train lines, clean energy networks, and next-
    generation industrial plants. It will also create new well-paying jobs,
    offer new educational opportunities, and unleash new entrepreneurial
    energy of the American people.
        My colleague, Professor Robert Hockett, and I have developed a
    specific proposal for creating this new kind of infrastructural growth-
    oriented public-private partnership. A White Paper detailing our
    proposal is attached as an Appendix to this testimony.
        It is this kind of programmatic reform--not a massive rollback of
    the Dodd-Frank Act--that the American economy and the American people
    need. I urge the Committee to rise to this challenge and not allow
    banks' self-serving deregulatory demands to distract its attention from
    what really matters to the American economy and the American public.
    Conclusion
        Promoting sustainable, socially inclusive long-term growth in
    America's real economy is a task of enormous public significance.
    Massive financial deregulation urged by the banking industry, however,
    will not foster such real economic growth: it will merely spur
    speculation-driven asset price inflation in secondary markets. That is
    what generates Wall Street's greatest short-term profits and causes
    wealth- and growth-destroying systemic crises. Weakening regulatory
    standards and effectively incapacitating FSOC, the Federal Reserve, the
    Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other Federal regulators will
    put us much closer to another financial disaster.
        Contrary to the financial industry's assertions, massive
    dismantling of the Dodd-Frank regime of systemic regulation will not
    benefit small businesses and struggling families across America. There
    is no evidence that the additional cost of banks' regulatory compliance
    with post-crisis regulations actually depletes banks' resources and/or
    diverts them away from productive uses. Despite their complaints about
    regulatory costs, American banking institutions are highly profitable
    and awash in cash, which they could use for lending to small businesses
    but instead choose to return to their shareholders in the form of
    dividends and share repurchases. Against that background, it is
    impossible to take the industry's attacks on Dodd-Frank seriously.
        The Committee should, therefore, reject the financial industry's
    unsubstantiated claims and requests for massive deregulation and
    demolition of the Dodd-Frank Act. The Committee should focus its
    attention on finding real solutions to the real problems associated
    with speculative short-termism and persistent misallocation of capital,
    which impede economic growth. Devising such solutions is challenging
    but necessary in order to make finance serve the Nation's long-term
    economic goals.

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

            RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR BROWN
                        FROM ROBERT R. HILL, JR.

    Q.1. Your testimonies cited certain metrics for measuring your
    banks' compliance costs. Of course, there are a variety of ways
    to measure a bank's costs and compliance burden. To help the
    Committee better understand the overall compliance burdens on
    your institutions:
        Please provide the ratio of total employees in your bank's
    workforce to employees.

    A.1. In 2009 and 2010, our compliance employees were housed in
    the Compliance Department. After the enactment of Dodd-Frank,
    the number of employees dealing with compliance grew
    dramatically; however, the growth was through employees
    throughout the bank and company, and not just in the Compliance
    Department. At the time, we did not endeavor to keep track of
    the number of compliance-related employees. In the last several
    years, however, we have endeavored to do so. The data below is
    a good faith effort to provide the requested numbers, but we
    would caution that they are conservatively stated in that we
    have employees in virtually every area of the bank working on
    compliance issues. As you will see, even on a conservatively
    stated basis, the number of compliance employees has gone up
    over eightfold.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         2009        2010        2011        2012        2013        2014        2015        2016
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Full time         700       1,015       1,071       1,324       2,106       2,081       2,058       2,055
        equivalents
             (FTEs)
    Compliance FTEs          6           6         N/A         N/A         N/A         N/A          40          51
             Ratio       0.86%       0.59%         N/A         N/A         N/A         N/A       1.94%       2.53%
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Q.2. Please provide your bank's compliance costs for each year
    from 2009 to the present.

    A.2. In reviewing the data below, please refer to the response
    above. As stated above, the data is difficult to capture with
    total precision. As noted above, the compliance costs in 2009
    or 2010 were largely contained in the Compliance Department.
    Today, they are spread over various areas of the bank and
    company. Again, this is our good faith effort to be responsive.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       2009        2010        2011        2012        2013        2014         2015         2016
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Estimated      $780,000    $840,000         N/A         N/A         N/A         N/A   $5,800,000   $7,500,000
           Total
      Compliance
           Costs
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Q.3. Please provide the combined dollar value of your bank's
    stock dividend payments and share repurchases for each year
    from 2009 to the present.

    A.3. Below is the stock dividend information you requested. In
    reviewing these numbers, however, there are several factors you
    should bear in mind so you will know that the growth of the
    bank and the number of its shareholders has changed
    dramatically over the course of the years for which you have
    asked us to provide information. For example, in 2013, the bank
    almost doubled in size and its number of shareholders, and
    capital, increased by roughly 40 percent. As a result, the
    dollar amount of dividends went up significantly. The change
    did not reflect an equivalent increase in dividend income to
    individual shareholders; it was simply the function of the
    bank's growth through acquisition.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         2009        2010        2011        2012        2013        2014        2015        2016
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Combined value       $8,623      $8,935      $9,856     $11,080     $16,207     $20,702     $25,072     $33,136
           of stock
           dividend
       payments and
              share
     repurchases (in
         thousands)
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Q.4. Please provide your bank's efficiency ratio for each year
    from 2009 to the present.

    A.4. Below is the data on the bank's efficiency ratios for the
    period in question. As you review this data, you should bear in
    mind that efficiency ratios are a function not just expenses
    but also revenue. Thus, as the bank grew through acquisitions,
    its revenue increased. In other words, it makes comparisons
    difficult. Further, in 2010, the bank recorded a nonrecurring
    gain. Absent that gain, the 2010 efficiency ratio would have
    been 69.89 percent, not 46.68 percent.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         2009        2010        2011        2012        2013        2014        2015        2016
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
       Efficiency       61.17%       46.68%      68.77%      72.20%      75.85%      71.41%      64.19%      64.16%
             Ratio
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Q.5. Please provide your bank's revenue from interchange fees
    linked to debit cards for each year from 2009 to the present.

    A.5. Below is the requested data. As I testified, South State
    Bank, for the relevant years, was under $10 billion. Thus, the
    Durbin Amendment interchange fee caps did not affect the bank's
    interchange fee revenue. Also, as noted above, the bank grew
    significantly during the time period in question. As a result,
    the revenue from interchange grew significantly for that
    reason.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        2009         2010        2011        2012        2013        2014        2015        2016
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Interchange       $3,717       $7,261      $9,467     $11,178     $18,143     $25,192     $27,939     $31,801
       Fee Revenue
               (in
        thousands)
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Q.6. During your testimony, you said ``Under Dodd-Frank,
    crossing the $10 billion in asset threshold has had very harsh
    implications for midsize banks For example, South State was
    impacted by over $20 million per year, a significant sum for a
    bank our size. What impacts does this have on our local
    communities? For us, that equates to 300 jobs. Approximately 10
    percent of our branches were closed, and even more jobs were
    diverted from lending to regulatory compliance.''
        Your bank appears to have grown from roughly 50 branches
    before the passage of Dodd-Frank, to about 180 this year,
    assuming completion of your proposed merger with Park Sterling.
    The Park Sterling transaction will be the ninth merger or
    acquisition by your bank of another bank or its branches since
    the beginning of 2010.
        As you know, branch closures can occur for a variety of
    reasons not related to regulatory costs, for example, in 2010,
    your bank closed 10 of the 36 branches that it acquired through
    the purchase and assumption agreement related to Community Bank
    & Trust, well before you passed the $10 billion threshold. (In
    another example, you closed two branches in Orangeburg, SC,
    after acquiring 12 Bank of America branches, reportedly because
    they were in close proximity to existing South State branches.)
        Finally, it appears that you closed 13 of 140 branches in
    2015, or about 9 percent, before you crossed the $10 billion
    threshold, and nine of your 127 branches last year and one so
    far this year, or about 8 percent of your branches. This
    compares to 2010, when you closed 10 of 86 branches, a rate of
    nearly 12 percent.
        Please explain the rationale behind the 10 percent closure
    number that you cited, and please provide supporting evidence
    that explains why these closures were caused by the various $10
    billion thresholds contained in Dodd-Frank, as opposed to other
    potential factors.

    A.6. As it relates to our branch closing strategy, well before
    officially crossing the $10 billion asset threshold in early
    2017, we began estimating the costs associated with, and
    resources required, to operate a bank with assets over $10
    billion. Beginning approximately 3 years ago, we started
    examining the magnitude of these expenses and thinking through
    steps to pay for them. In my testimony, I stated that we closed
    about 10 percent of our branches in order to cover these
    increased costs of growing to over $10 billion. Closing
    branches does reduce cost and can help pay for this burden, but
    this step alone does not pay for the costs of crossing $10
    billion. As you can see in the data above, the incremental
    compliance costs are approximately $6-8 million per year for
    our company plus we will lose approximately $17 million dollars
    in interchange income beginning in 2018 due to impact from the
    Durbin amendment. In total, we will realize an approximate $25
    million pre-tax negative impact to earnings by crossing this
    threshold. On average, it costs us approximately $500,000
    annually to operate a branch. If we were to accomplish all of
    the savings through branch closures alone, we would have to
    close roughly 50 branches and eliminate over 250 jobs. Whether
    we close branches or find other ways to pay for these expenses,
    the burden is considerable. The $25 million represents
    approximately 15 percent of the net income of our company in
    2016.
                                    ------

            RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR SASSE
                        FROM ROBERT R. HILL, JR.

        [From Robert R. Hill, Jr.--We have prepared responses to
    many of the follow up questions submitted by Senators Brown,
    Sasse, and Tillis. Some of the questions pertained to banks
    larger than South State or touched on macro-economic issues
    that we did not feel equipped to answer and therefor
    respectfully did not supply an answer. What follows are the
    questions to which we do offer an answer.]
    Q.3. As you know, Dodd-Frank imposed new stress test
    requirements on banks above $10 billion.
        How should policymakers balance providing more transparency
    and guidance to regulated entities about passing stress tests,
    without enabling regulated entities to, as some have suggested,
    ``game'' these processes?

    A.3. We believe that, in general, policymakers should focus on
    minimum acceptable capital ratios as opposed to arbitrary
    stress tests.

    Q.4. Do stress tests accurately depict how a firm would perform
    during a financial crisis? If not, what should be done, if
    anything, to improve their accuracy?

    A.4. To help improve the accuracy of stress tests, focus on the
    amount of risk weighted assets each firm holds would, in our
    opinion, be beneficial.

    Q.5. Are stress tests properly tailored to match the unique
    risk profile of smaller financial institutions?

    A.5. Stress test are currently structured based on the asset
    size of financial institutions and do not focus on the risk
    profile of the institutions. As stated above, focusing on the
    amount of risk weighted assets each firm holds would more
    properly align with the institution's risk profile.

    Q.6. As you know, House Financial Services Chairman
    Hensarling's legislation, the Financial CHOICE act--in part--
    would allow banks to opt-out of various regulatory
    requirements, in exchange for meeting a 10 percent leverage
    ratio.
        What are the most persuasive arguments for and against
    relying upon a leverage ratio as a significant means of
    reducing systemic risk in the financial system?

    A.6. The most persuasive argument for relying upon a leverage
    ratio as a significant means of reducing systemic risk in the
    financial system is the 10 percent leverage ratio, which is a
    simple approach and represents a significant amount of capital.
    The most persuasive argument against relying on the ratio is
    that the leverage ratio does not take into consideration the
    risk rating of the assets and the loan loss reserve.

    Q.7. Under this legislation, is the 10 percent leverage ratio
    the right level? If not, where should policymakers set the
    level at?

    A.7. A 10 percent leverage ratio is the right level.

    Q.8. What evidence do you find or would you find to be the most
    persuasive in discerning the proper capital levels under this
    proposal?

    A.8. Different asset categories carrying different degrees of
    risk, so focusing on risk rating the assets, rather than cash
    and loans being equal, would seem logical.

    Q.9. I'm concerned that our Federal banking regulatory regime
    relies upon arbitrary asset thresholds to impose prudential
    regulations, instead of an analysis of a financial
    institution's unique risk profile.
        Should a bank's asset size be dispositive in evaluating its
    risk profile in order to impose appropriate prudential
    regulations?

    A.9. No, a bank's asset size should not be dispositive in
    evaluating its risk profile in order to impose appropriate
    prudential regulations.

    Q.10. If not, what replacement test should regulators follow
    instead of an asset-based test?

    A.10. As a replacement test, regulators should focus on the
    levels of risk based capital and the amount of debt the
    financial institution has, as better tests for evaluating a
    bank's Risk Profile.
                                    ------

            RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR TILLIS
                        FROM ROBERT R. HILL, JR.

    Q.1. I'm a proponent of tailoring regulations based off of the
    risk profiles of financial institutions, as opposed to having
    strict asset thresholds that do not represent what I believe is
    the smart way to regulate. But, my question here is really
    about the importance of ensuring that we have a system that is
    rooted in fundamental, analytical, thoughtful regulation so
    that we can achieve and execute on goals, whether balancing
    safety and soundness with lending and growth, or encouraging
    more private capital in the mortgage market to protect
    taxpayers and reform the GSEs.
        On the latter point, I would like for you to comment on the
    down-stream consequences that the wave of new mandates have on
    housing finance reform--whether Dodd-Frank, regulatory rules
    and/or Basel prudential requirements--and, specifically, the
    ability to bring private capital as we look to reform the GSEs?

    A.1. Recent regulatory reform which specifically impacts the
    mortgage industry has placed a wave of burden and uncertainty
    on us as originators of mortgage loans. The Dodd-Frank reforms
    specifically limited access to credit for many borrowers.
    Borrowers who fit into the credit box of the GSEs are exempt
    from some of the QM requirements as long as the GSEs are in
    conservatorship or until 2021. Due to the unknown liability and
    litigation expenses, our bank has tightened our credit box in
    our portfolio lending, specifically around the 43 percent DTI.
        Basel Requirements have burdened many institutions in their
    ability to originate new loans which they service themselves.
    This has forced them to sell loans to aggregators that they
    would desire to retain as customers and earning assets on the
    books. These are not large institutions and their holding of
    MSRs is not a driver of the performance of their institutions,
    however it is restricting how they do business and forcing them
    to send more loans to what are likely SIFI.
        Other regulations such as TRID, HMDA, and other CFPB
    enforcement has been implemented with many questions still
    unanswered. This causes disparities in practices in our
    industry which put institutions that are playing by the rules
    at a competitive disadvantage. This lack of clarity has also
    increased the cost to originate a loan, which today is now
    above $7,000 where it was close to $4,000 6 years ago. This is
    increasing the cost to the customer and limiting competition in
    the mortgage space as it has driven consolidation.
        Regulations should be based more on the type of lending
    that is done and should focus on firms who are purposely
    defying regulations rather than institutions afraid of clerical
    errors which can cost exorbitant enforcement fees and personnel
    costs.
        GSE reform is absolutely necessary as we continue to
    rebuild a sound secondary mortgage market. The GSEs perform a
    critical task in offering a 30-year fixed option that is liquid
    and with clear guidelines. The GSEs have done a great job in
    the past few years of focusing on their customers and what can
    enable us to lend to more borrowers. The ability of the
    benefits the GSEs bring the market is imperative to continue
    into the future. With that said, taxpayers should not be
    exposed to the risk present in this market and credit risk
    should be transferred to the private sector. We would hope that
    the GSEs or their future state can continue with some mandate
    to offer affordable housing support with low-down payment
    options and less restrictive credit standards than private
    entities would likely offer.

    Q.2. Can you give me your opinion on where the current credit
    box is, how consumers get loans both for personal, business,
    etc., how about in the mortgage space? Is it harder to get a
    mortgage today versus in years past?
        How does this impact underserved and underbanked
    populations in the U.S.?

    A.2. Underbanked and underserved borrowers are not being fully
    served today. Borrowers with little or no credit are
    immediately not within the credit parameters set forth by
    programs offered by the GSEs, FHA, and USDA. The current FICO
    models reward borrowers with very established credit that
    underbanked populations do not necessarily possess. Buyback and
    compare ratio risks from the agencies have forced lenders to
    place overlays on the agency credit parameters which limit an
    underserved borrower's ability to find lending options. It is
    critical for the FHFA to continue to promote access to these
    programs and find ways to encourage responsible but broad
    lending across the credit spectrum.

    Q.3. Can you tell me how, in addition to other macroeconomic
    variables that affect lending, the regulatory environment has
    played a role in lenders' willingness/ability to extend
    mortgage credit? What needs to change?
        I see evidence that suggests that nonbanks now make up the
    predominate percentage in the mortgage market, what is your
    view of how this affects the stability of servicing mortgages
    in a crisis environment and how does this affect access to
    financing?

    A.3. Nonbanks now make up more than 50 percent of originations
    based on 2016 HMDA data. These loans are typically sold to SIFA
    institutions and large national servicers. These servicers will
    continue to be slow to react in a crisis and not able to meet
    the needs of all customers.
        Nonbank mortgage lenders are typically regulated by States
    and do not receive the scrutiny as a federally regulated bank
    and enforcement for noncompliance is rare. A smaller nonbank
    lender offering riskier products that may be taking advantage
    of borrowers may never see the types of audits a bank does. A
    bank will err on the side of caution in order to remain in
    compliance while making decisions that hurts its ability to
    compete fairly in the marketplace.

    Q.4. Just to be clear--from my perspective I'm not advocating
    to return to the lending standards of the sub-prime/pre-crisis
    era, but I do believe that we need to evaluate some the
    regulations such as the use of the False Claims Act, having
    unified servicing standards, TILA-RESPA, etc., so that we can
    help expand credit safely to both first-time buyers and
    refinancers, and I would like your perspective on how we (1)
    address larger regulatory reform in the banking ecosystem; and
    (2) how your institutions and similarly situated ones play a
    role in providing credit to consumers.

    A.4. A bank like ours has shown through years of prudent
    lending, low complaints, and positive financial performance our
    ability to properly run our business while meeting the lending
    needs of the communities we serve. We agree that the lending
    standards pre-crisis were well below where they should have
    been, however the pendulum has swung too far alongside
    regulation by enforcement that quite frankly scares prudent
    lenders like us from offering anything but the basic products
    for our customers. The uncertainty in recent regulations has
    forced us to take a competitively disadvantaged position to our
    nonbank peers. Regulation uncertainty has also put our teams in
    a position to constantly question what is right or the intent
    of the law. Loans are taking longer to close, at a higher cost,
    and with more uncertainty sometimes to the borrower due to
    recent regulations, namely TRID.
        Regulatory reform in the mortgage market should be based
    not just on size, but on the types of lending. The biggest help
    that our regulators can give us is clarity. Confusion leads us
    to always take the most conservative route which has downstream
    effects such as limited access to borrowers and higher costs to
    lenders.

    Q.14. Are assets alone the single most important factor for
    determining systemic risk? If not, why use that as a threshold
    at all?

    A.14. Yes, assets are the single most important factor for
    determining systematic risk, but the focus should be on the
    type and risk of assets rather than just the total amount of
    assets.
                                    ------

            RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR BROWN
                         FROM SAULE T. OMAROVA

    Q.1. Can you please describe the nature of banking agencies'
    so-called ``safety and soundness'' authority? Would you be
    concerned by any proposals to interfere with the existing
    safety and soundness regime?

    A.1. Ensuring ``safety and soundness'' of the banking system
    is, and has always been, the fundamental substantive goal of
    U.S. bank regulation. In addition to performing vital functions
    of taking deposits and facilitating payments, banks play a
    critical role in the transmission of monetary policy. Yet, the
    very nature of their business makes banks especially vulnerable
    to runs and other shocks that can quickly bring them down.
    Traditionally, banks' primary liabilities are short-term (e.g.,
    demand deposits), while their assets are long-term and illiquid
    (e.g., loans). The concept of ``safety and soundness'' reflects
    the long-standing recognition of this built-in vulnerability of
    the banking business model and the importance of preserving
    banks' solvency and ability to operate uninterrupted.
        Accordingly, Federal and State banking agencies' authority
    to continuously monitor, evaluate, and act to enhance
    individual banks'--and the entire banking system's--safety and
    soundness is very broad. The agencies' mandate to maintain and
    ensure safety and soundness permeates and underlies the entire
    regime of U.S. bank regulation and supervision. In that sense,
    it is difficult to describe precisely the scope or the specific
    nature of that authority. In effect, every specific rule
    governing banking institutions' activities represents a
    particular articulation of the safety and soundness
    requirement. Moreover, it is impossible to reduce the safety
    and soundness mandate to any specific, limited, quantifiable
    factor or rule. It empowers and obligates the regulatory and
    supervisory agencies to exercise an inherently context-specific
    judgment as to whether any particular activity, transaction, or
    business practice potentially threatens stable and reliable
    operation either of an individual bank or of the banking/
    financial system more generally. Most, if not all, legal rules
    applicable to U.S. banks expressly provide for the relevant
    regulators' authority to make a particularized substantive
    determination of permissibility or legality of an otherwise
    permissible action based on its potential safety and soundness
    consequences.
        Put simply, this authority may be analogized to the medical
    professionals' maxim of ``Do no harm.'' And just like any
    attempt to limit or qualify that principle would undermine not
    only the integrity but the very efficacy of medical care, so
    would any attempt to limit or qualify bank regulators'
    authority to ensure safety and soundness of the banking system
    undermine that system's integrity and efficacy.
        Reflecting the dramatic lessons of the latest financial
    crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act strengthened Federal bank
    regulators' mandate to ensure safety and soundness of the U.S.
    financial system. The creation of the Financial Stability
    Oversight Council (FSOC), heightened prudential oversight of
    certain large bank holding companies (BHCs) and nonbank
    financial firms designated by FSOC as systemically important
    financial institutions (SIFIs), mandatory periodic stress
    testing and submission of ``living wills'' by large BHCs and
    SIFIs--all of these post-crisis regulatory innovations are
    merely an updated version of the centuries-old safety and
    soundness regime. They constitute a coherent framework for
    ensuring vital stability of today's complex and dynamic
    financial system. Regulators need all of these tools to be able
    to monitor the levels of risk in the financial system and to
    prevent potentially destructive systemic shocks. Taking away or
    in any way limiting regulators' and supervisors' flexibility
    and ability to exercise discretion in determining how and when
    to act in the name of the safety and soundness of the U.S.
    financial system would be unacceptably reckless. It will
    effectively guarantee another systemic financial crisis.
        Any legislative reform that seeks to eliminate, limit, or
    weaken the Dodd-Frank Act's regime of system-wide prudential
    oversight, therefore, goes directly against the most important
    public interest in preserving the safety and soundness of the
    American financial system. The list of such dangerous reforms
    includes proposals to limit FSOC's power to designate SIFIs and
    the Federal Reserve's power to supervise them, to lower
    existing capital adequacy requirements, to make stress testing
    more easily predictable and thus subject to ``gaming,' to
    replace the Orderly Liquidation Authority, and so forth. None
    of these proposed reforms will strengthen our financial system.
    To the contrary, they will make it a lot more vulnerable and
    dysfunctional.
                                    ------

            RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR SASSE
                         FROM SAULE T. OMAROVA

    Q.1. Federal Reserve Governor Powell testified at the April 14,
    2016, Senate Banking Committee hearing entitled ``Examining
    Current Trends and Changes in the Fixed-Income Markets''. He
    said that ``some reduction in market liquidity is a cost worth
    paying in helping to make the overall financial system
    significantly safer.''
        Is there also a risk that reducing liquidity in the
    marketplace also makes the marketplace unsafe?
        If so, how should regulators discern the difference between
    an unsafe reduction in liquidity and a safe reduction in
    liquidity?

    A.1. There are trade-offs in every regulatory choice. For
    example, prohibiting distribution of marijuana protects people
    from serious drug addiction, but it also reduces availability
    of marijuana for medical or recreational purposes. How should
    we discern the difference between an unsafe reduction in
    availability of marijuana and a safe reduction in such
    availability? In that context, lawmakers often don't seem to
    spend too much time on finding the precise scientifically
    proven level of ``safeness'' and take a principled normative
    stand: one public policy goal is more important than the other.
        The same logic should apply to this theoretical debate on
    ``safety vs. liquidity'' in financial markets. There is no
    objective, scientific mark for an absolute optimal level of
    market liquidity. It all depends on the context and the
    consequences. There was plenty of liquidity in the years before
    the latest crisis, and then that liquidity evaporated
    overnight. ``Liquidity'' was merely another word for
    unproductive churning and excessive speculation. It was bad for
    the market and for the American economy. So, clearly, we cannot
    use the pre-crisis ``liquidity'' measures as our reference
    point for ``safe vs. unsafe'' determinations. That choice is
    not scientific; it is fundamentally normative. We as a society
    should make a normative, political choice whether it is more
    important for us to enable uninhibited financial speculation
    (for which ``market liquidity'' is often a euphemism) or to
    prevent financial crises.

    Q.2. As you know, regulators imposed numerous capital
    requirements after the 2008 financial crisis.
        Have Federal regulators sufficiently studied the cumulative
    impact--including on liquidity in the marketplace--of these
    various changes?
        If not, how should Federal regulators resolve this issue?
    For example, some have called to delay the imposition of new
    financial rules and regulations in order to facilitate a
    broader study of these issues.

    A.2. Industry actors' calls for delaying the application of
    capital rules, ostensibly for the purposes of ``studying''
    their impact, are merely a strategy to avoid higher capital
    requirements--and thus to continue to operate with high levels
    of leverage. There is no absolute, scientifically precise level
    of capital that is perfectly optimal under any circumstance.
    How much equity (i.e., capital) a particular bank should have
    at any single point depends on how volatile the value of its
    assets is--and that can change quickly in response to various
    internal business decisions and external forces in the markets.
    That is why, for example, countercyclical capital buffer
    requirements are especially important: they provide the
    necessary cushion for absorbing sudden losses when an asset
    price boom turns to the inevitable bust.
        Thus, financial regulators and supervisors should have
    sufficient flexibility and discretionary authority to
    determine, on the ground and in the context of a particular
    institution, whether that institution has sufficient capital to
    withstand the loss of asset value without hurting its
    creditors. Regulators and supervisors are best equipped to
    render such determinations. They should be given a broader
    authority to do just that. Saddling regulators with the
    inherently meaningless task of studying ``cumulative effects''
    of all capital requirements on all financial firms will
    effectively render them incapable of doing their job. The only
    real-world effect of that strategy will be more leverage, more
    risk, and more instability in the financial system. No real new
    knowledge produced as a result of any such studies will be even
    remotely worth that risk.

    Q.3. As you know, Dodd-Frank imposed new stress test
    requirements on banks above $10 billion.
        How should policymakers balance providing more transparency
    and guidance to regulated entities about passing stress tests,
    without enabling regulated entities to, as some have suggested,
    ``game'' these processes?
        Do stress tests accurately depict how a firm would perform
    during a financial crisis? If not, what should be done, if
    anything, to improve their accuracy?
        Are stress tests properly tailored to match the unique risk
    profile of smaller financial institutions?

    A.3. I discuss the issue of stress tests' transparency at
    length in my written statement.
        To add to that discussion, I would like to emphasize how
    misguided it is to judge the efficacy or public benefits of
    stress tests by reference to how ``accurately'' they depict the
    actual behavior of any specific firm in an actual crisis. No
    such predictions or assessments can be made, and that is not
    the purpose of stress testing. Stress tests play out a variety
    of scenarios, including extreme ones, as a way of identifying
    serious weaknesses in the institution's financial condition and
    risk management. Going through the process of stress testing is
    just as important as passing the tests. It is that aspect of
    stress testing--the dynamic, learning, procedural aspect--that
    is critical for preserving financial stability more broadly.
    Forcing the Federal Reserve to be more ``transparent'' about
    its methodologies and assumptions will significantly weaken, or
    even eliminate, that beneficial effect of stress testing. It
    will only benefit financial institutions, but not the financial
    system--and not the American economy.

    Q.4. As you know, House Financial Services Chairman
    Hensarling's legislation, the Financial CHOICE act--in part--
    would allow banks to opt-out of various regulatory
    requirements, in exchange for meeting a 10 percent leverage
    ratio.
        What are the most persuasive arguments for and against
    relying upon a leverage ratio as a significant means of
    reducing systemic risk in the financial system?
        Under this legislation, is the 10 percent leverage ratio
    the right level? If not, where should policymakers set the
    level at?
        What evidence do you find or would you find to be the most
    persuasive in discerning the proper capital levels under this
    proposal?
        If the leverage ratio was set at the right level, do you
    find merit in eliminating a significant portion of other
    regulatory requirements, as with the Financial CHOICE Act? Are
    there any regulations that you would omit beyond those covered
    by the Financial CHOICE Act?
        What impact would this proposal have on liquidity in the
    marketplace?

    A.4. A straight leverage ratio is important as a useful
    baseline for judging the level of capital adequacy of financial
    institutions. Unlike risk-based capital ratios, the leverage
    ratio does not allow for risk-weighting of asset values, which
    can be easily and dangerously miscalculated (either
    intentionally or unintentionally). In that sense, it provides a
    critical corrective to the malleable risk-based capital ratios.
        As explained above, there is no scientifically derived,
    theoretically ``perfect'' level of capital for all banks at all
    times. True, the leverage ratio of 10 percent would be a
    significant improvement over the current requirement of 5
    percent-6 percent at maximum. However, it is not a magical
    number that will somehow eliminate the need for close
    regulatory and supervisory oversight, stress tests, and other
    systemic risk-reducing measures.
        To the extent we do have any sort of an ``objective''
    benchmark for judging the functional leverage ratio levels, the
    market gives us a number much higher than 10 percent. A 10
    percent leverage ratio is woefully low compared to the level of
    equity at nonfinancial firms. Thus, publicly traded
    nonfinancial firms typically have 30 percent-40 percent in
    shareholder equity on their balance sheets: i.e., their
    leverage ratio is in the 30 percent-40 percent range. If a
    company has less equity, it has to pay higher price for its
    debt. This is how the free capitalist market operates in the
    absence of a public subsidy.
        Banks enjoy such a subsidy, which is precisely why they
    prosper with such extremely low levels of true equity. The
    multifaceted system of bank regulation and supervision exists
    as the necessary substitute for the missing market discipline.
    Any attempt to weaken such system of oversight will only free
    banks to incur more leverage and risk, and to shift the risk
    and the ultimate losses onto the American taxpayer. A 10
    percent leverage ratio will not prevent that result. Perhaps a
    30 percent-40 percent leverage ratio would, but even that is
    debatable.

    Q.5. I'm concerned that our Federal banking regulatory regime
    relies upon arbitrary asset thresholds to impose prudential
    regulations, instead of an analysis of a financial
    institution's unique risk profile.
        Should a bank's asset size be dispositive in evaluating its
    risk profile in order to impose appropriate prudential
    regulations?
        If not, what replacement test should regulators follow
    instead of an asset-based test?

    A.5. In my written statement, I discussed at length the reasons
    why it is fundamentally misleading to characterize asset size-
    based thresholds for enhanced prudential supervision as
    ``arbitrary.'' We live with a myriad of ``arbitrary'' but
    practically necessary threshold-based rules every day: the
    legal age for voting is 18, the legal age for drinking is 21,
    and so forth. If all such numerical thresholds were deemed
    unacceptably ``arbitrary'' and replaced with ``tailored''
    determinations of every single person's individual ability to
    exercise voting rights or consume alcohol, it would create a
    far more arbitrary, unpredictable, and chaotic world. Nobody
    would ever seriously propose such a ``reform'' in the name of
    ``tailoring'' law to every person's ``unique'' circumstances.
    Similarly, replacing clear bright-line rules by a requirement
    that Federal regulators assess each financial firm's unique
    risk profile and circumstances would be impractical and
    ineffective. Doing so will impose unbearable costs on the
    public and essentially eliminate the entire regime of enhanced
    oversight of systemically important financial institutions.
    That would be an extremely dangerous result.
        A better, more pragmatic way to accommodate the inevitable
    differences between megabanks and smaller institutions, which
    currently fall into the same SIFI category, could be to allow
    for a discretionary downward adjustment of the intensity of the
    enhanced supervision regime for certain institutions, based on
    a combination of their size and business activities. In other
    words, it may be desirable to have a formalized process
    whereby, e.g., a traditional midsized bank with assets above
    $50 billion could petition the regulators for a lighter
    regulatory or supervisory treatment. The petitioning bank would
    have the burden of proving to the regulators why such special
    dispensation would be reasonable in its case--and why it would
    not create any unreasonable risks to the safety and soundness
    of the U.S. financial system.
        This approach would properly place the burden of securing a
    special private benefit (lower compliance costs) on those
    private entities that seek it, and not on the public that
    finances Federal regulatory agencies. Moreover, this system
    would be in line with the fundamental free-market principles:
    the firms that want to have their own, uniquely tailored law
    will have to pay for it and bear responsibility for its
    outcomes.
                                    ------

             RESPONSES TO WRITTEN QUESTIONS OF SENATOR REED
                         FROM SAULE T. OMAROVA

    Q.1. This Committee heard testimony last week from Professor
    Adam Levitin that since the Wall Street Reform and Consumer
    Protection Act, the cumulative pre-tax return on equity in the
    banking sector has been 225 percent for community banks and 320
    percent for megabanks. At the same time, since 2010, real
    income has actually fallen by 0.6 percent for the average
    American family. These statistics highlight that banks, and
    especially large banks, have done very well in the years since
    the Wall Street Reform Act, while the typical American family's
    real income is now less than before the bill. In order to grow
    the economy, wouldn't pursuing policies that increase
    productivity and lift middle class wages be better than
    deregulating banks?

    A.1. This is absolutely correct. To stimulate healthy long-term
    growth of the national economy, it is critical to ensure that
    the maximum number of Americans actually receive wages that are
    regular, stable, and sufficiently high to enable them to
    increase their spending--without incurring potentially
    dangerous amounts of debt. Higher incomes for more ordinary
    Americans will translate directly into higher demand for
    consumer goods and services, which will stimulate expansion in
    production of such goods and services. That, in turn, will
    translate into broader industrial growth, further job creation,
    technological innovation, and research and development. It is
    in that fundamental sense that, ultimately, consumer demand is
    the key catalyst of the Nation's economic growth.
        Importantly, however, financing demand through consumer
    debt is an unsustainable and extremely dangerous strategy. As
    the financial crisis of 2007-09 demonstrated, cheap credit
    booms inevitably lead to wealth-destroying economic crashes.
    Only by lifting Americans' real income levels can we create the
    conditions necessary for spurring sustainable long-term growth
    of the American economy. Currently, Americans are forced to
    resort to borrowing to make up for their steadily declining
    real incomes, so that the aggregate consumer debt now stands at
    a record high of about $13 trillion. Such high debt burden,
    combined with stagnating wages and continuing erosion of
    America's manufacturing base, is bound to depress consumer
    demand and, as a result, hold back economic growth.
        Deregulating banks will not remedy this underlying dynamic.
    Banks currently have plenty of cash available for lending. The
    real problem here is not some alleged contraction of banks'
    lending capacity because of regulatory compliance costs: it is
    the lack of effective and sound demand for credit from over-
    extended consumers and struggling businesses in the sluggish
    real economy. Deregulating banks will only enable them to use
    more of their money for speculative trading, shareholder
    dividends, and executive bonuses. It will not magically create
    a robust real economy that can put that cash to productive use.

    Q.2. Many of us have come to recognize that the Orderly
    Liquidation Authority is an incredibly important part of the
    Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Could you
    please explain why OLA is so important to our constituents,
    especially those who may be working multiple jobs just to make
    ends meet?

    A.2. The Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) is a special new
    regime for handling the failure of a major financial
    institution. It was created in response to the financial crisis
    of 2007-09, which made it clear that large financial firms--
    banks, securities firms, insurance conglomerates, etc.--are
    fundamentally different from any regular private company in a
    free-market economy. When a nonfinancial company fails, the
    ordinary bankruptcy process--governed by the general Bankruptcy
    Code and administered by bankruptcy courts--aims to use the
    company's remaining assets to satisfy claims of its direct
    creditors: lenders, employees, suppliers, utility providers,
    etc.
        When a large financial institution like JPMorgan or Goldman
    Sachs fails, however, this time-consuming court-administered
    process does not work as well. Large financial institutions are
    highly leveraged, much more so than nonfinancial firms. Their
    debt obligations are much more varied, complex, and difficult
    to value. Many of these institutions' creditors trade in
    financial markets and, therefore, cannot afford to wait for the
    bankruptcy court to decide how much money they will get from
    the bankrupt firm. If these trading counterparties don't get
    paid on time, they may default on their own obligations or try
    to avoid that by rapidly selling their own financial assets
    (such as stocks, bonds, etc.): in either case, these creditors'
    behavior may trigger a dangerous chain reaction. Financial
    institutions provide services of critical public importance:
    they are central to the smooth operation of the payments and
    clearing systems, they manage ordinary Americans' savings and
    investments, they insure against various risks, etc. The
    bankruptcy of a large financial institution threatens to
    disrupt performance of these functions and thus cause much
    unanticipated distress in the broader economy.
        OLA is designed to provide a tailored approach to handling
    the failure of such an institution. It is simply a special
    version of corporate bankruptcy, which shifts the primary focus
    toward minimizing systemic disruptions that are likely to occur
    when a large, systemically important financial firm goes down.
    Among other things, OLA enhances the ability of the relevant
    Federal regulatory agencies to (1) monitor the financial
    condition, solvency and liquidity of all big banks, investment
    banks, and other financial firms; (2) mandate that all such
    financial firms have in place reliable plans for raising money
    and addressing any sudden shocks to their solvency or
    liquidity, before such shocks actually hit them; and (3) put in
    place the necessary ``safety net'' (i.e., access to last-resort
    emergency funding, international agreements with other
    countries' regulators, etc.) to ensure that the failure of a
    systemically important financial institution does not cause a
    major breakdown in the provision of financial services to the
    public.
        Put simply, the OLA regime is designed to ensure that, even
    if a major bank is about to collapse, ordinary Americans can
    keep going about their daily business without worrying about
    accessing their cash at ATMs, having their checks cleared,
    getting their wages deposited and their credit card payments go
    through. By strengthening the resilience of the financial
    system to the failure of any single firm, the OLA regime is
    critical for preventing full-on financial crises and subsequent
    economic depressions. It is a well-established fact that
    working-class and middle-class people get hit the hardest by
    such crises. That means that every hard-working American
    directly benefits from the existence and proper functioning of
    the OLA regime and other complementary elements of the Dodd-
    Frank regulatory system. Repealing or weakening the Dodd-
    Frank's OLA provisions, by contrast, will weaken and expose the
    American economy to increasingly frequent and devastating
    financial crises. Therefore, it is in the interest of every
    hard-working American to keep the OLA regime in place.

                  Additional Material Supplied for the Record

      STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY THE INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY BANKERS OF AMERICA

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            STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY THE AMERICAN BAMKERS ASSOCIATION

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                    STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY FIFTH THIRD BANK

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         STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY THE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL BANKERS

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                   STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY TEXAS CAPITAL BANK

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                                  GSIB SCORES

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