FSOC’s Failing Grade?

All the recent hype over the legitimacy of high frequency trading has overshadowed another significant event in financial regulation: In a speech in Washington, D.C., yesterday Securities and Exchange Commissioner Luis Aguilar offered some fairly strong criticisms of recent actions by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). The speech was significant because it is the first time that a Democratic commissioner has criticized the actions of one of the Dodd‐​Frank Act’s most controversial creations. (To date, only the Republican commissioners have criticized the FSOC, and we all know that Republicans don’t much like Dodd‐​Frank.) Indeed, Aguilar’s statements indicate just how fractured and fragmented the post‐​Dodd‐​Frank “systemic risk monitoring” system is.


At issue is the FSOC’s recent foray into the regulation of the mutual fund industry. Aguilar described the FSOC’s actions as “undercut(ting)” the SEC’s traditional authority and described a major report on asset management by the FSOC’s research arm, the Office of Financial Research, as “receiv(ing) near universal criticism.”


He went on to note that “the concerns voiced by commenters and lawmakers raise serious questions about whether the OFR’s report provides (an) adequate basis for the FSOC to designate asset managers as systemically important … and whether OFR is up to the tasks called for by its statutory mandate.”


For those of us who have been following this area for a while, the answer to the latter question is a resounding “no”. The FSOC claims legitimacy because the heads of all the major financial regulatory agencies are represented on its board. Yet it has been clear for a while that the FSOC staff has been mostly off on a frolic of its own.


Aguilar notes that the SEC staff has “no input or influence into” the FSOC or OFR processes and that the FSOC paid scant regard to the expertise or industry knowledge of the traditional regulators. Indeed, the preliminary actions of the FSOC in determining whether to “designate” mutual funds as “systemic” echoes the Council’s actions in the lead‐​up to its designation of several insurance firms as “Systematically Important Financial Institutions” that are subject to special regulation and government protection. It should be remembered that the only member of the FSOC board to vote against the designation of insurance powerhouse Prudential as a “systemic nonbank financial company” was Roy Woodall, who is also the only board member with any insurance industry experience. And in the case of mutual funds and asset managers, the quality of the information informing the FSOC’s decisions—in the form of the widely ridiculed OFR study—is even weaker. The process Aguilar describes, where regulatory agencies merely rubber stamp decisions made by the FSOC staff, is untenable (in part because the FSOC staff itself has no depth of experience, financial or otherwise).


Aguilar’s comments could be viewed as the beginning of the regulatory turf war that was an inevitable outcome of Dodd-Frank’s overbroad and contradictory mandates to competing regulators. But the numerous and well documented problems with the very concept of the FSOC means that it is time for Congress to pay some attention to Aguilar’s comments and rein in the FSOC’s excessive powers.