One of the key points of debate over financial institution regulation reform is how many different bank regulators there should be and the extent of their respective bailiwicks. Some argue that the number of regulators is a secondary issue. It's not. It's a first tier concern. A critical flaw of our banking regulation system is the ability of financial institutions to engage in regulatory arbitrage, which has a corrosive effect on the quality of bank regulation. As long as there are multiple federal banking regulators supervising essentially equivalent financial institutions there will be regulatory arbitrage, which will inevitably undermine whatever statutory framework Congress sets forth for financial institution regulation.
Tag: OTS
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Proposed Fed/OTS/NCUA Credit Card Regulations
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[Updated 5.4.08. Updated language, largely comparing Regs to pending legislation, is in brackets.]
This afternoon, the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision, and National Credit Union Administration unveiled a set of new, proposed unfair and deceptive practices (UDAP) rules under section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Commission Act. A copy is available here. Other materials are here. It’s not light reading–269 pages.
Some of the proposed rules are quite favorable for consumer interests. Others do not go far enough, however, and perhaps most importantly, there are several major issues that the proposed rules simply do not address. From an initial perusal, the gist of the rules (and what’s missing) seems to be as follows (below the break):