[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 109 (Tuesday, July 14, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H5142-H5144]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HOLDING COMPANY REGISTRATION THRESHOLD EQUALIZATION ACT OF 2015
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and
pass the bill (H.R. 1334) to amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934
to make the shareholder threshold for registration of savings and loan
holding companies the same as for bank holding companies.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The text of the bill is as follows:
H.R. 1334
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Holding Company Registration
Threshold Equalization Act of 2015''.
SEC. 2. REGISTRATION THRESHOLD FOR SAVINGS AND LOAN HOLDING
COMPANIES.
The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78a et seq.)
is amended--
(1) in section 12(g)--
(A) in paragraph (1)(B), by inserting after ``is a bank''
the following: ``, a savings and loan holding company (as
defined in section 10 of the Home Owners' Loan Act),''; and
(B) in paragraph (4), by inserting after ``case of a bank''
the following: ``, a savings and loan holding company (as
defined in section 10 of the Home Owners' Loan Act),''; and
(2) in section 15(d), by striking ``case of bank'' and
inserting the following: ``case of a bank, a savings and loan
holding company (as defined in section 10 of the Home Owners'
Loan Act),''.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from
Virginia (Mr. Hurt) and the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Maxine
Waters) each will control 20 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Virginia.
General Leave
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all
Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their
remarks and include extraneous material on this bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Virginia?
There was no objection.
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may
consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1334, the Holding Company
Registration Threshold Equalization Act.
I would like to thank Representatives Womack, Himes, Wagner, and
Delaney for their bipartisan work to achieve a unanimous vote in the
Financial Services Committee.
H.R. 1334 provides a technical correction to the JOBS Act in the
truest sense of the term. The JOBS Act updated the shareholder
threshold for bank holding companies to register and deregister under
the Securities Exchange Act to 2,000 shareholders and 1,200
shareholders respectively.
However, due to a technical oversight, the statute did not
specifically extend the same treatment to savings and loan holding
companies, despite their being similarly organized to bank holding
companies.
Since the enactment of the JOBS Act, dozens of bank holding companies
have taken advantage of these provisions while savings and loan holding
companies have been forced to wait for action from Congress to correct
the error.
By putting savings and loan holding companies on par with banks, H.R.
1334 provides these institutions the same flexibility as banks to
reduce their SEC-related compliance costs and better deploy capital
throughout their communities. H.R. 1334 is identical to legislation
that received 417 votes in the House last Congress.
I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this commonsense,
bipartisan legislation.
I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such
time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding that this bill addresses an
oversight in the JOBS Act that established new,
[[Page H5143]]
higher thresholds for registration, termination of registration, and
suspension of public reporting for banks and bank holding companies,
but not for savings and loan companies.
In the JOBS Act, we recognized that banks and bank holding companies
were inadvertently becoming public companies by virtue of their
securities being distributed to a larger number of shareholders than
permitted under the securities laws, even though these institutions
were largely held within their own communities.
Accordingly, we provided banks and bank holding companies with
regulatory relief by raising the thresholds that trigger public company
reporting.
H.R. 1334 would extend this relief to savings and loan companies
which, like banks and bank holding companies, are still subject to
mandatory public reporting requirements by the banking regulators; so
information will continue to be available to shareholders and the
public.
Last Congress, we passed this noncontroversial bill out of committee
and on the House floor. Since that time, the Securities and Exchange
Commission has, under its own authority, proposed to extend the JOBS
Act provision to savings and loan companies.
{time} 1415
The SEC estimates that approximately 90 of the 125 savings and loan
holding companies that have a class of registered securities would be
eligible to terminate registration or suspend reporting under its
proposal.
I am pleased to support this bill, which will extend the benefits we
provide in the JOBS Act to those 90 companies that represent an
additional class of community banks.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may
consume to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Womack).
Mr. WOMACK. Mr. Speaker, I thank the manager of this legislation for
the time. I would like to also thank Chairman Hensarling and the entire
Financial Services Committee for, yet again, ensuring that this bill,
the Holding Company Registration Threshold Equalization Act, is put in
front of the full House and sent on to the Senate.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues on both
sides of the aisle, Representative Himes, Representative Wagner, and
Representative Delaney, for their continued efforts to codify this
necessary JOBS Act clarification.
Mr. Speaker, this is the third time that I have come to the floor to
speak on this truly bipartisan bill, and it is unfortunate that we are
still without a successful resolution to the problem because we can all
agree that small community banks and savings and loan holding companies
were not the cause of the financial crisis. They shouldn't be treated
as if they were.
That is exactly why the House and Senate eliminated some of the
unnecessary burdens placed on our small lenders by passing the JOBS Act
in the 112th Congress. However, the JOBS Act, which raised the
registration threshold and decreased deregistration threshold for bank
holding companies, unfortunately didn't explicitly do so for savings
and loan holding companies as well. Mr. Speaker, this was an oversight.
Thanks to the oversight, savings and loan holding companies are still
having to spend their resources to comply with regulations intended for
larger banks, instead of sharing the same ability bank and bank holding
companies have been granted to focus on serving the lending needs of
their communities.
A cosponsor of the JOBS Act, I can say with absolute certainty that
excluding savings and loan holding companies was not our intent. H.R.
1334 would correct this oversight and would simply ensure that savings
and loan holding companies are treated in the same manner as bank and
bank holding companies, something my colleagues confidently affirmed
when this bill passed in the 113th Congress 417-4.
Mr. Speaker, they say the third time is the charm. I am hopeful that,
with the Senate's newfound leadership, we will finally get this bill
where it needs to be, on the President's desk.
I urge my colleagues to help me get it there by supporting the
passage of H.R. 1334.
Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to
stand here with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle today to
support so many pieces of legislation that have come out of the
Financial Services Committee.
I have always said with Dodd-Frank, where there were technical
problems or oversights or unintended consequences, that I would work
with my colleagues on the opposite side of the aisle, and much of what
you see here today, that is what we have done.
Just as there may have been some unintended consequences in Dodd-
Frank, we find that with the JOBS Act, there were unintended
consequences; and certainly, I stand with them in correcting those. It
could happen in any legislation; we know that. This is an example of
that. I am very, very pleased to support this legislation today.
I reserve the balance of my time at this moment.
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may
consume to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett), the chairman of
the Capital Markets Subcommittee.
Mr. GARRETT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his work on this.
I also thank Mr. Womack and Mr. Himes of Connecticut for all of their
work on H.R. 1334.
I am thankful for the great bipartisan message that we just heard
from the ranking member as well on the JOBS Act, and I will look
forward to working with her even more for those technical corrections
on the Dodd-Frank piece of legislation. I am looking forward to doing
that going forward.
As she says, there is little doubt that the JOBS Act did have a
positive impact upon our economy, as evidenced by the boost in initial
public offerings since 2012 and the number of companies, both public
and private, that are taking advantage of some of the law's provisions
right now.
Title VI of the JOBS Act included an important provision that the
gentlewoman talked about, that increased the outdated shareholder
thresholds that determined just when banks and bank holding companies
have to register with the SEC.
These thresholds, by the way, they have been around for a long time.
They haven't been changed for over four decades. What they were doing
is they were basically forcing the smaller companies, the small banks,
to register as full reporting companies with the SEC, and that is
really a very costly burden on them. It is very often the case that it
is inappropriate for small lenders who are already regulated and
examined by a series of bank regulators.
As the gentlewoman points out, we had a slight oversight in the
drafting of the JOBS Act. The SEC, at first, they did not include
savings and loans companies under the updated threshold; and this made
no sense, particularly when considering that S&Ls perform largely the
same functions as banks and are overseen by the same regulators.
With few exceptions, S&Ls tend to be generally small institutions
that serve the local communities. This registration with the SEC would
have had the ultimate effect of raising the cost of lending to families
and small businesses.
This would be the exact opposite of what the JOBS Act intended. The
underlying legislation would make a technical correction to the JOBS
Act. It would ensure that the S&Ls are able to take advantage of the
new provisions of the law.
One final point, while the SEC, last December, proposed to include
S&Ls under the new thresholds, a regulation that can be taken away at
any moment is no substitute for what we have here, statutory text.
Congress has a clear role here to step in and fix the issue.
Again, I thank Mr. Womack and Mr. Himes for their work in fixing that
issue; and I urge passage of the underlying legislation.
Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Speaker, I have no additional
speakers.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. HURT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairman of
the Subcommittee on Capital Markets for his leadership on this. I want
to thank the ranking member for her spirit of
[[Page H5144]]
bipartisan cooperation in fixing this part of the JOBS Act.
In conclusion, it is my hope that this House will pass this good,
commonsense measure.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. CARTER of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R.
1334, the Holding Company Registration Threshold Equalization Act of
2015.
In 2012, Congress raised the threshold number of shareholders a bank
can have before they must register with Securities and Exchange
Commission from 500 to 2,000.
At the same time, Congress raised the threshold for bank shareholders
from 300 to 1,200 before a bank could deregister for the Securities and
Exchange Commission and convert to a private bank.
However, due to a drafting oversight, these raised thresholds
currently do not apply to savings and loan institutions.
These institutions are vital for the continued development and growth
of our economy.
For a large segment of American homeowners, savings and loan
institutions are the primary source of financial assistance for
purchasing a home.
Some would say that the structure in which these companies are built
is the same structure that our country was built. They are generally
locally owned and privately managed; and communities use these
businesses as a savings institution and use these funds to help other
individuals in the community construct, purchase, repair, or refinance
their home.
With a locally owned, community driven foundation, it is wrong to
subject these businesses to the same level of oversight and regulation
as a large bank without affording them the same registration and
deregistration thresholds.
I support this bill because I believe Congress must use every effort
to build up the American people on a local level. We are not going to
grow our economy from Washington, D.C., but we can create an
environment on a state and local level that empowers Americans to grow
themselves.
I would like to thank my colleague from Arkansas, Mr. Womack, for his
hard work on this issue and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Hurt) that the House suspend the rules and
pass the bill, H.R. 1334.
The question was taken; and (two-thirds being in the affirmative) the
rules were suspended and the bill was passed.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
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