The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) is calling on the Obama administration to issue an executive order that would create a moratorium on federal financial regulation in order to protect smaller financial institutions against “regulatory burdens that are not required by statute or necessitated by serious, material, quantifiable and well-documented safety and soundness concerns.”
In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), CUNA President and CEO Bill Cheney said that a regulatory moratorium would allow regulators to study the impact of their current rules on the nation’s smaller financial institutions. Cheney also asked the OMB to create an Office of Regulatory Burden Monitoring, which would determine the burden that new regulations would have on smaller lenders.
“We are not suggesting that prudential regulators be urged to ignore significant safety and soundness issues or statutory directives,” Cheney wrote. “However, the time has come to stop other new regulatory requirements under a moratorium. Such a moratorium would facilitate compliance for agencies with Executive Order 13579 by allowing them to actually take stock of their rules and report to you on not only which provisions have been eliminated, but also the impact of the removal of those provisions.”