At a Brookings Institution event on June 20, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, a top antitrust official for the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ or Department), announced that the Department will reassess its approach to bank merger enforcement given current market realities. Specifically, the Department will assess whether the factual and economic assumptions underlying its 1995 Bank Merger Guidelines are adequate to measure today’s competition.
On May 25, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced that it has revised its manual on bank enforcement actions to specifically address banks that exhibit or fail to correct persistent weaknesses. The OCC’s focus is on the larger and more complex banks it supervises.
On May 23, Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) delivered remarks at the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund 2023 Bank On National Conference. One of the focuses of the Chairman’s remarks was on entities that misrepresent the availability of deposit insurance. ”[S]ince 2022, the FDIC has taken action against more than 85 entities that were misrepresenting the nature, extent, or availability of deposit insurance. In some instances, these firms had made misleading claims in connection with crypto assets while others had apparently developed fraudulent websites to trick consumers into believing they were doing business with a bank.”
Today, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would impose special assessments to recover losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) arising from the FDIC’s protection of uninsured depositors in the wake of the two significant bank closings in March 2023. The Federal Deposit Insurance Act requires the FDIC to recover any losses to the DIF as a result of protecting uninsured depositors through a special assessment. The law also provides the FDIC authority to consider the types of entities that benefited the most from the assistance provided.
On April 12, at a roundtable discussion hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Vice Chair Travis Hill opined that the following potential regulatory responses to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and liquidation of Silvergate Bank should be considered.