Deregulation and Proxy Recounts

Regulation.

There have been a lot of stories recently about how the U.S. government has kind of given up on financial regulation. This week the Senate moved to limit strict Fed oversight (and stress tests) to just the dozen biggest banks. Here is a story about how the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has gotten much laxer on a range of mostly consumer-protection-type regulations. (Its interim head "declared that the agency was returning to what he called its natural state.") Yesterday Richard Cordray announced that he will step down as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, presumably to be replaced by an ashtray or a block of wood or Eric Trump. And: "Justice investigation into Russian laundering through Deutsche Bank gone quiet." None of these things feel like blockbuster structural changes to the U.S. banking system, but together they represent a pretty big lurch of the regulatory dial toward deregulation.