WASHINGTON–The Federal Reserve’s new vice chairman for supervision has laid out an aggressive agenda for revisiting and easing a basket of bank rules and other oversight.

Michelle Bowman, recently confirmed by the Senate, said those rules have become “onerous and unnecessary.”

According to the Bowman, the Fed will now be reconsidering how it writes rules and polices for some of the nation’s largest and most complex banks. 

“Our goal should not be to prevent banks from failing or even eliminate the risk that they will,” Bowman said in prepared remarks. “Our goal should be to make banks safe to fail, meaning that they can be allowed to fail without threatening to destabilize the rest of the banking system.”

Critical of Stronger Rules

Bowman is not new to the Federal Reserve, having served as a Fed governor since 2018, and during her tenure she has consistently been critical of efforts to impose stricter rules on the banking sector. 

After being confirmed to the post, Bowman said her first remarks since being confirmed that the regulator will soon launch numerous projects aimed at easing requirements and streamlining oversight, including in many areas that have been longtime targets for complaints by banks.

Among those are:

• How the Fed supervises large banks
• How to make some bank rules less restrictive
• Changes that could ease the bank merger process