
President Trump is close to nominating Federal Reserve governor Michelle Bowman as the central bank’s new vice chair for supervision, according to multiple media reports, tapping a former Kansas banking commissioner as the Fed’s top banking cop.
Bowman could take oversight of giant US banks in a new direction as the Trump administration makes it clear it wants to lift constraints on lenders and overhaul a regulatory framework put in place following the 2008 financial crisis.
Last week, in a New York City speech, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called post-crisis regulation “backward-looking” and said he wants better coordination among bank oversight agencies.
“We need our financial regulators singing in unison from the same song sheet,” he said, citing “a broken supervisory culture.”
Bowman has signaled that she could be in favor of some changes. She opposed some of the proposals put forward by the former vice chair for supervision, Michael Barr, including a new set of controversial capital rules that would have required lenders to set aside greater buffers for future losses.
The requirements are based on an international set of capital requirements known as Basel III imposed in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis.
Banks have been fighting this US proposal for the last year in an aggressive public campaign and even dropped hints about suing regulators if they don’t get their way.
Bowman has argued that the plan needed “substantive changes” and that an increase in capital requirements at the scale proposed by regulators could significantly harm the economy.
She wanted the Fed to tailor capital requirements to a bank’s size and risk profile as the regulator does now, arguing that she hasn’t seen compelling evidence that changing this approach would bolster the banking system.
“I’d be excited to see Miki Bowman appointed,” Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon said in a Fox News interview Wednesday. “I think the industry would be excited.”
The 53-year-old Bowman was appointed to the Fed’s board of governors by Trump during his first term in office in November 2018 to fill an unexpired term ending January 2020. She was reappointed in January 2020 and is serving a term that ends in January 2034.
Before the Fed, she was the state bank commissioner of Kansas and vice president of Farmers & Drovers Bank in Council Grove, Kan.
Bowman also previously worked for Senator Bob Dole of Kansas from 1995 to 1996 and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge from 2003 to 2004, in addition to other roles in Washington policy circles.