Volcker Rule Regulatory Harmonization Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HULTGREN. Mr. Speaker, I first want to thank the hardest working, most effective chairman in all of Congress; and I also want to thank my good friend and colleague French Hill for sponsoring this legislation. I also want to thank my friend and colleague from Illinois, Bill Foster, for his work on this.

I am also very happy to be a cosponsor of the Volcker Rule Regulatory Harmonization Act. This legislation strikes a bipartisan balance for simplifying some of the regulatory burden of the Volcker rule and provides a clear exemption for community banks.

The Dodd-Frank Act granted responsibility to five different financial regulators with implementing and enforcing the Volcker rule: the Fed, OCC, FDIC, SEC, and CFTC. Every Member of this body knows that it can be difficult to come to an agreement when you have too many cooks in the kitchen. Imagine if this were the case for promulgating, implementing, and enforcing something as complicated as the Volcker rule.

One Illinois bank, that serves thousands of my constituents, explained it is this way: ``This overlapping authority with respect to interpretations and guidance, as well as examinations and supervision, is inefficient and requires unnecessary time and effort, on the part of banks as well as regulators, to ensure compliance.''

The Volcker Rule Regulatory Harmonization Act is an artful solution to dealing with this issue. It grants the Federal Reserve the exclusive rulemaking authority under section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act and provides the sole examination and enforcement authority by an entity's primary Federal regulator. The bill also addresses the concerns that community banks have raised with the Volcker rule.

H.R. 4790 exempts banking organizations that do not have or are not controlled by entities with $10 billion or more in total consolidated assets and total trading assets or trading liabilities that are more than 5 percent of total consolidated assets.

Because of the Volcker rule's complexity, even those community banks that do not conduct any proprietary trading have, nonetheless, had to incur large costs simply proving what the regulators already know, that they are not engaged in activities covered by the rule. This is simply not fair to subject community banks to these costs associated with this.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source