Trump to announce Bowman soon as pick for Fed’s top bank cop

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump will nominate Federal Reserve Gov. Michelle Bowman to be the central bank’s next vice chair for supervision as soon as Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The move fills a post vacated by Michael Barr, who was picked by former President Joe Biden and resigned from that job earlier this year — avoiding a potential fight with Trump over the role. Barr said in January “the risk of a dispute over the position could be a distraction from our mission.” 

The vice chair for supervision must be a member of the Fed’s board and since Barr didn’t step down from his role on the Fed’s Board of Governors, Trump has to choose Barr’s successor from among the remaining board members or wait for a new vacancy. 

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the plan to replace Barr with Bowman.

Bowman was a strong critic of the U.S. regulators’ plan to force the country’s biggest lenders to hold significantly more capital to buffer against losses and a financial crisis. The industry had argued that the original proposal unveiled in 2023 would put U.S. banks at a disadvantage against international rivals.

In September, Barr previewed extensive revisions that would roughly slice in half the 19% capital hike that regulators had planned for the biggest U.S. banks. At the time, Bowman recommended a full re-proposal of the capital rules.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers in February that he hoped a version of the long-awaited plan could be reached “fairly quickly.”

“We remain committed to completing Basel III Endgame. We think it’s good for U.S. banks, it’s good for our economy that there be a global standard beneath which foreign banks can’t fall,” Powell said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

Powell also told lawmakers last month that bank regulatory policy was less volatile before Congress established a vice chair for supervision position. He said that the central bank will “continue on until there’s a new vice chair for supervision and we can very much get our work done.”

Bowman, a fifth-generation banker, has previously served as the state bank commissioner of Kansas and was a vice president at Farmers & Drovers Bank. She became a member of the Fed’s board in 2018 and chairs the central bank’s Subcommittee on Smaller Regional and Community Banking. 

Bowman dissented against the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates by a half percentage point in September. She said at the time she preferred a more “measured” approach and would have favored a quarter percentage point cut.

Her nomination to serve as vice chair for supervision would have to be confirmed by the Senate.