By Pete Schroeder
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump will nominate Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman as vice chair for supervision as early as Wednesday, a White House official said.
A former community banker and frequent critic of over-zealous bank regulation, Bowman would replace Michael Barr, a Democratic Biden appointee who stepped down from the supervision post at the end of February to avert a potential legal dispute with the Trump administration.
Bloomberg News reported the news earlier on Wednesday.
Bowman was widely seen as a frontrunner to fill the role, in part due to the fact that the Fed’s board is currently full, meaning a replacement must be named from existing governors.
Spokespeople for Bowman and the Fed declined to comment.
A former Kansas banking regulator, Bowman has served on the Fed board since 2018 when Trump nominated her to fill a post specifically reserved for an official with community banking experience. She is expected to take a much lighter regulatory touch than Barr, whose rulemaking projects she has loudly criticized in multiple speeches over the past 18 months.
Bowman voted against Barr’s proposal to implement the so-called “Basel III Endgame” rule that would overhaul how big banks gauge their risks, requiring them to hold significantly more capital. She has argued the capital burden should be reduced.
Partly spurred on by Bowman’s criticism, big banks lobbied hard to water down that Basel rule, which has since failed to progress due to infighting among regulatory officials on the best path forward.
Bowman has also suggested the Fed should consider ways to make its annual big bank “stress tests” more transparent and predictable for lenders. The Fed recently announced it planned to make several significant changes to the stress tests going forward, and big banks have sued to challenge their legality.
Despite little experience with global banks, Bowman would be one of the top bank regulators in the U.S. government and globally, as the Fed oversees the nation’s largest and most complex lenders.
Before joining the Fed, Bowman served as the state bank commissioner of Kansas for a year and a half, before which she spent several years as vice president of Farmers & Drovers Bank, a Kansas community bank.
Early in her career, she was a congressional staffer, and also held roles in the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
(Reporting by Pete Schroeder in Washington and Bipasha Dey in Bengaluru, Editing by Louise Heavens and Andrea Ricci)
