On March 14, 2018, the U.S. Senate passed a significant financial services reform bill 67-31 on a bipartisan basis that would eliminate certain requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act, including, most notably, increasing, from $50 billion to $250 billion, the threshold at which a large banking organization automatically becomes a systemically important financial institution that is subject to stricter supervisory standards. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S. 2155) would also (i) exempt banks with less than $10 billion total consolidated assets from the Volcker Rule; (ii) exempt certain funds placed on deposit with certain central banks by a custodial bank from the calculation of the supplementary leverage ratio; (iii) reduce certain reporting and supervision requirements applicable to community banks; and (iv) ease certain securities law requirements. A number of the provisions of the bill track legislation that has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives over the past year, the most significant of which is the Financial Choice Act of 2017, which would amount to an omnibus revision of the Dodd-Frank Act. The House will now have to consider the Senate bill, and the differences between the two bills will likely be negotiated and resolved in a Conference Committee of the House and Senate.
The full text of the bill is available at: https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/s2155/BILLS-115s2155es.pdf.
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