WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's new top regulatory official laid out an ambitious agenda for revisiting and easing numerous bank rules and oversight policies which she argued have become onerous and unnecessary.
Michelle Bowman, who was confirmed to be the Fed's Vice Chair for Supervision on Wednesday, said the Fed will be reconsidering how it writes rules and polices some of the nation's largest and most complex banks. In prepared remarks, she argued that the influx of rules since the 2008 financial crisis merits reconsideration.
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"Our goal should not be to prevent banks from failing or even eliminate the risk that they will. 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," she said.
Bowman, who has served as a Fed governor since 2018, has long been critical of efforts to impose stricter rules on the banking sector. In her first remarks since being confirmed to the Fed's top regulatory post, she said the Fed 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 initiatives will be changes to how the Fed supervises large banks, plans to make some bank rules less restrictive, and a consideration of changes that could ease the bank merger process.
Reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama
