Even without Durbin Amendment repeal, Congress should pass the CHOICE Act
Published by the R Street Institute with Clark Packard.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, has done the yeoman’s work of putting together a host of fundamantal conservative reforms in the CHOICE Act. Although repeal of the Durbin amendment would have been a positive, pro-market reform, Congress should pass the bill even if this repeal is not included.
The most important provision of the bill allows banks the very sensible choice of maintaining substantial equity capital in exchange for a reduction in onerous and intrusive regulation. This provision puts before banks a reasonable and fundamental trade-off: more capital, less intrusive regulation. This is reason enough to support the CHOICE Act. Its numerous other reforms also include improved constitutional governance of administrative agencies, which are also a key reason to support the bill.
Accountability of banks
The 10 percent tangible leverage capital ratio, conservatively calculated, as proposed in the CHOICE Act, is a fair and workable level.
A key lesson of the housing bubble was that mortgage loans made with 0 percent skin in the game are much more likely to cause trouble. To be fully accountable for the credit risk of its loans, a bank can keep them on its own balance sheet. This is 100 percent skin in the game. The CHOICE Act rightly gives relief to banks holding mortgage loans in portfolio from regulations that try to address problems of a zero skin in the game model – problems irrelevant to the incentives of the portfolio lender.
Accountability of regulatory agencies
The CHOICE Act is Congress asserting itself to clarify that regulatory agencies are derivative bodies accountable to the legislative branch. They cannot be sovereign fiefdoms, not even the dictatorship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The most classic and still most important power of the legislature is the power of the purse. The CHOICE Act accordingly puts all the financial regulatory agencies under the democratic discipline of congressional appropriations. This notably would end the anti-constitutional direct grab from public funds that was granted to the CFPB precisely to evade the democratic power of the purse.
The CHOICE Act also requires of all financial regulatory agencies the core discipline of cost-benefit analysis. Overall, this represents very significant progress in the governance of the administrative state and brings it under better constitutional control.
Accountability of the Federal Reserve
The CHOICE Act includes the text of The Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, which improves governance of the Federal Reserve by Congress. As a former president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank once testified to the House Committee on Banking and Currency: “Obviously, the Congress which set us up has the authority and should review our actions at any time they want to, and in any way they want to.” That is entirely correct. Under the CHOICE Act, such reviews would happen at least quarterly. These reviews should include having the Fed quantify and discuss the effects of its monetary policies on savings and savers.
Reform for community banks
A good summary of the results of the Dodd-Frank Act is supplied by the Independent Community Bankers of America’s “Community Bank Agenda for Economic Growth.” “Community banks,” it states, “need relief from suffocating regulatory mandates. The exponential growth of these mandates affects nearly every aspect of community banking. The very nature of the industry is shifting away from community investment and community building to paperwork, compliance and examination,” and “the new Congress has a unique opportunity to simplify, streamline and restructure.”
So it does. The House of Representatives should pass the CHOICE Act.