The point of the Senate-passed bipartisan banking bill would be to boost economic growth. It’s right there in the name of the bill: The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.
The Trump administration has long said that relief from the post-financial crisis Dodd-Frank rules and other bank regulations would be a key part of its plan to drive the economic growth rate above 3 percent.
Yet, the case that the specific provisions of the bill would increase growth hasn’t been the focus during debate. Instead, the bill’s Republican and Democratic bipartisan proponents frequently were forced to play defense as they moved it through the Senate, under attack from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Warren and several other liberals bashed the bill as a giveaway to big banks.
The Washington Examiner asked some of the bill’s sponsors and backers, including major bank and credit union trade groups, how they would expect the bill to increase economic growth.
They identified two problems in particular that the bill is meant to address: The declining number of community banks and a slowdown in business lending, particularly small business lending, following the implementation of the post-crisis rules on banks.
Republicans and the industry have blamed those trends on Dodd-Frank, and House Republicans last year passed legislation that would have mostly replaced the law with a more conservative framework that would have been far less intrusive on the financial industry.
The Senate’s bill, which was written by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo and passed with 17 Democratic votes, is much narrower. It is advertised as an attempt to sidestep the question of whether Wall Street is overregulated and instead address the problems that even many Democrats agree are plaguing smaller banks. It would seek to alleviate those problems by allowing community banks to escape some of the most onerous rules, such as the Volcker Rule meant to prevent banks from speculating with deposits insured by the federal government and some of the numerous new rules on mortgages.
“Let’s keep in mind the legislation is very modest in what it seeks to accomplish,” said J.W. Verret, a scholar at the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
The American Bankers Association, the biggest bank group, noted that in the years following the enactment of Dodd-Frank, there were 291 fewer banks each year on average, and the industry lost nearly 25 percent of banks overall. The biggest losses have come among very small banks, ones with less than $100 million in assets — the kinds of banks that might provide home loans and maybe business loans for a single community. Nearly half of those have disappeared.
Furthermore, only seven new banks have opened since Dodd-Frank, which critics of the law chalk up to the high costs of complying with all its rules.
The argument goes like this: Big banks with big profits and large workforces are better able to handle the fixed costs of complying with the law and filling out all the relevant paperwork. Hiring compliance officers is much more difficult for community banks, which can’t spread the costs out over more earnings.
For the typical community bank, compliance staff doubled in the wake of Dodd-Frank, according to Mercatus researchers.
Separately, but relatedly, the industry blames the new law for preventing banks from exempting certain loans, both because of the burdens of paperwork and compliance and because of the restrictions on some kinds of loans.
One example is mortgage lending, which is subject to new regulations meant to prevent the kinds of abuses that became prevalent in the subprime crisis. “A lot of loans that could be made aren’t being made” because of the rule, said Mike Schenk, vice president of research and policy analysis for the Credit Union National Association.
The Senate bill would allow smaller credit unions and banks to skip some of the most burdensome parts of the rules for home loans they keep on their own books.
More generally, though, the financial industry blames the law for slow lending.
Total lending is lower, relative to the overall economy, than it was before the crisis, the American Bankers Association noted. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce drew attention to evidence that small business lending, in particular, is less than what it could be. The business group noted that small business loan originations are down more than 40 percent since 2008, according to data from federal financial regulators.
The Chamber’s own survey of business treasurers found that the vast majority have seen changes in finding financing, leading a minority to raise prices. Other surveys, including from the Federal Reserve and from outside private sources, indicate that many small businesses have trouble getting the financing they need.
Those finance woes could be connected to overregulation of small banks. “There’s a link there,” Verret said.
The narrative of bank critics is much simpler: Banks are doing fine, and they just want the government out of their businesses so they can keep more profits for themselves.
“The bankers don’t feel they’re making enough money,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a group that advocates for stricter financial regulations. “That’s the economic problem.”
The bank industry has been consolidating, and smaller banks have been getting snapped up in mergers and acquisitions for decades, Stanley noted. It’s a trend that long predates Dodd-Frank.
Small banks have been disappearing partly because Congress moved in the 1990s to allow more interstate branch banking. Also, efficiencies of scale, especially in offering consumer products such as credit cards, have given an advantage to bigger banks over smaller ones.
As for the slow lending, Stanley argued that too much lending could be a bigger problem than not enough lending. Too much debt, after all, was at the heart of the financial crisis.
He noted that while lending is slow compared to the housing bubble years, loan growth is faster than historical averages and faster than the economy as a whole. The decline in small business lending by banks could reflect a shift to non-bank lending for small businesses, he suggested.
The strongest talking point for Warren and other bank critics is simply that banks are relatively profitable.
The share of unprofitable banks is as low as anytime during the mid-2000s and nearly as good as in the 1990s, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, setting aside one-time losses in the most recent quarter prompted by the tax law. Return on equity for community bank owners is about as good as it was in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
For credit unions, however, boosting profits is itself an economic stimulus. Credit unions are owned by depositors, Schenk noted, meaning that added earnings attributable to less compliance go to people who need the money.
“At a very basic level, any regulatory relief is going to be helpful because it gives money back to average people,” he said.
