CHICAGO–Gary Cohn, the top economic advisor to President Trump, said he expects Congress will exempt most banks from rules imposed by Dodd-Frank.
Speaking to a meeting here, Cohn said he expects that by the end of 2017 the threshold at which a bank is considered a “systemically important financial institution" (SIFI) will be raised to at least $200 billion from its current level of $50 billion.
“We need to move those capital levels back to more rational levels,” Cohn, director of the White House's National Economic Council, told the American Bankers Association conference here.
The Dodd-Frank rules were created to ensure that banks do not fail and trigger a crisis similar to that that led to the Great Recession.
Currently, banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets face stricter rules under Dodd-Frank, and banks with more than $50 billion face even tighter requirements.
Cohn told the bankers he’s “encouraged” by talks with Senate Banking Committee members from both sides.
Cohn added that raising the SIFI threshold was a key aspect of the Trump administration’s mission to “let banks be banks again … in the way they think they should do it, not the way the government thinks they should do it.”