ICBA Launches “Plan for Prosperity” Legislative Platform for 114th Congress
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) January 15, 2015 -- The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) today launched its Plan for Prosperity regulatory relief platform for the 114th Congress. The Plan for Prosperity is a set of common-sense legislative priorities that would promote lending and stimulate local economies and job growth by relieving community banks from unnecessary regulation.
“Community banks support local economic growth one loan at a time, but excessive and unnecessary government regulation is stifling our local economies and stunting job growth,” ICBA President and CEO Camden R. Fine said. “ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity helps put our local communities back to work with targeted and common-sense regulatory relief that will support additional community bank lending and local investments.”
ICBA’s multi-pronged Plan for Prosperity is designed to reduce excessive and unnecessary government regulation while supporting greater regulatory accountability. This flexible platform will be quickly advanced as legislation, and ICBA urges policymakers to enact these needed, common sense reforms. The Plan would:
• amend the Basel III capital rules to restore their original intent as a set of capital rules that apply mainly to international banks,
• modernize the Federal Reserve’s Small Bank Holding Company Policy Statement to support additional access to capital,
• reform Securities and Exchange Commission rules to reduce unnecessary expenses,
• exempt community banks from certain mortgage reforms to support the housing recovery,
• reduce annual privacy notice redundancies to cut wasteful paperwork,
• improve accountability in bank exams with a workable appeals process,
• strengthen the industry’s voice by creating an Assistant Treasury Secretary for community banks,
• reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure more balanced regulation,
• eliminate arbitrary and frivolous “disparate impact” lending suits,
• support mutual banks with new charter and dividend rules,
• require rigorous and quantitative justification of new rules,
• cut the red tape in small-business lending,
• institute a more practical approach to information reporting by creating a short-form call report that could be filed in the first and third quarters of each year by well-capitalized community banks,
• facilitate capital formation by reforming Subchapter S corporation regulations and extending the net-operating-loss carry-back, and
• target the Volcker Rule only to the largest and most systemically risky banks.
The steady piling on of more and more regulations over many decades has become a growing threat to community banks and the communities they serve. The ICBA Plan for Prosperity supports tiered regulation that will maintain appropriate oversight of the largest and riskiest financial institutions while offering needed relief to thousands of low-risk community banks, enabling them to devote more resources to serving their communities.
To view the ICBA Plan for Prosperity, visit http://www.icba.org/PFP2015.
About ICBA
The Independent Community Bankers of America®, the nation’s voice for more than 6,500 community banks of all sizes and charter types, is dedicated exclusively to representing the interests of the community banking industry and its membership through effective advocacy, best-in-class education and high-quality products and services. For more information, visit http://www.icba.org.
Aleis Stokes, Independent Community Bankers of America, +1 (202) 821-4457, [email protected]
Share this article