Update 794 — Powell Hearings on Hill:
Inflation, Basel III/Endgame, Exec Comp
Fed Chair Jerome Powell testified before the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees yesterday and today respectively, at a critical juncture for the Federal Reserve. Questions ranged from the Fed’s efforts to bring inflation down to its two percent goal to the Basel III/Endgame proposal on banks’ capital requirement regime.
Tomorrow, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release a report on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for June, key data that will inform the Fed’s decision on when it can finally provide relief from interest rates that have been at a 23-year high for the past year, on which Powell made no promises. Asked also about Basel III, Powell hinted that he may favor a re-proposal. Regarding the long-delayed Dodd-Frank 956 executive compensation rulemaking, he again made no promises.
We detail his testimony on these issues as well as review last week’s June jobs report below.
Best,
Dana
Small Signs of Cooling in June Jobs Report
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 206,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1 percent in June, according to the June jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday. The report shows that the labor market remains strong but shows signs of slowing.
Job growth in May was revised down by 54,000, from 272,000 to 218,000 jobs, while job growth in April was revised down by 57,000, from 165,000 to 108,000 jobs. This brings the average monthly jobs gain over the past three months to 177,000 jobs.
Source: Council of Economic Advisers
Job gains last month exceeded estimates by economists, as jobs increased for the forty-second consecutive month. The largest gains came in:
- government (70,000 jobs)
- health care (49,000 jobs)
- social assistance (34,000 jobs)
- construction (27,000 jobs)
The unemployment rate ticked up slightly from 3.9 percent in April and 4.0 percent in May to 4.1 percent last month, slightly exceeding expectations of the rate remaining unchanged at 4.0 percent. Although this is the highest level of unemployment seen since October 2021, the unemployment rate remains historically low.
In June, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 0.3 percent on a monthly basis, and by 3.9 percent over the past twelve months, both in line with estimates.
Today’s jobs report will be the last before the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) convenes at the end of this month to decide whether to hold interest rates steady at the 5.25 to 5.5 percent range once again. The Federal Reserve has held rates at this elevated level for over a year, in an effort to bring down inflation, which remains above its target of two percent on an annualized basis. While Fed Chair Jerome Powell has suggested interest rates are likely at their peak for this cycle of rate hikes, there is uncertainty about when the FOMC will finally initiate cuts.
Chair Powell has made clear that officials see two paths the economy could take to warrant initiating interest rate cuts: inflation continuing its trend toward the Fed’s two percent goal or a slowing of the labor market. The slight but unexpected increase in the unemployment rate last month may be a sign that the so-far-resilient labor market is beginning to slow. The jobs report alone, however, is unlikely to push the FOMC toward an immediate cut. Committee officials are expected to opt to continue monitoring inflation, including June consumer price index (CPI) data which will be released tomorrow, and new labor market data. Financial markets expect the FOMC to finally initiate long-awaited interest rate cuts at its September meeting.
Powell’s Congressional Testimony
This week, Fed Chair Powell discussed these monetary policy questions, along with a slew of regulatory issues, as he delivered his semi-annual monetary policy report to Congress before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the House Committee on Financial Services.
- Monetary Policy
Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-OH) highlighted that the Fed’s main tool to combat inflation, interest rates, cannot address the corporate greed that has driven up prices across the economy.
Additionally, the Fed’s monetary policy has exacerbated the nation’s housing crisis. Despite the Fed’s interest rate increases, housing prices and rents have increased sharply because of a lack of supply. Chair Brown pointed out that the amount of income families need to qualify for a mortgage has nearly doubled since the Fed began hiking rates from near zero in early 2022. Higher interest rates have also made the construction of multi-family homes more difficult to finance.
Powell said the June jobs report presented “a pretty clear signal that labor market conditions have cooled considerably” since the Fed began increasing rates in March 2022.
- Basel III Endgame
Legislators on both sides of the aisle took the opportunity to discuss the Basel III Endgame proposal – jointly put forward by the Fed, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The proposal would implement stricter capital requirements on banking firms with $100 billion or more in total assets and firms that engage in significant trading activities, effectively increasing capital requirements for the 37 biggest banks in the United States.
Powell has previously testified that he expected “broad and material changes” to be made to the proposal, and this week said that Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision Michael Barr has “held a series of discussions with other bank regulatory agencies around potential changes to the original proposal” and that they are “very close to agreeing on the substance of those changes.” He noted, however, that “nothing is agreed until everything’s agreed.”
Most Republicans on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees called for the proposed rule to be scrapped and entirely reproposed. Powell said, “My view, the strongly held view of members of the board, is that we do need to put a revised proposal out for comment for some period.” A reproposal of the rule would likely significantly delay the implementation of stronger capital standards for a handful of the nation’s largest banks.
Powell explained that he expects that after regulators reach an agreement, they would “publish the proposed changes, and also the quantitative impact survey (QIS) and also the effects that the QIS suggests, the changes would have,” then “put all that out for comment again for a period of time and then… move toward finalizing that.”
House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry (R-NC) suggested in his questions that any disagreement on the path forward for the Basel III Endgame proposal by the FDIC or OCC would be “running against the independence of the Fed,” ignoring that proposal was jointly put forward by all three agencies and that the FDIC and the OCC are also independent agencies.
- Banning Risky Incentive-Based Bank Exec. Comp.
Democratic lawmakers raised concerns at both hearings about the Federal Reserve’s failure to join other federal banking regulators and federal agencies in proposing a rule to ban executive compensation plans that incentivize inappropriate risk-taking at financial institutions, which has led to bank failures and eventual bailouts at taxpayers’ expense.
Such a rule would fulfill the mandate of Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which required that bank executives’ compensation packages not incentivize them to make reckless decisions that could risk the safety and soundness of the firms they lead. The May 2011 deadline set by Congress to pass such a rule ended almost fourteen years ago.
Section 956 required that six federal regulators – the SEC, Federal Reserve, FDIC, OCC, National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) – jointly promulgate a rule concerning incentive-based compensation practices at certain financial institutions. Most recently, the six agencies proposed such a rule in 2016.
In early May this year, the Fed and SEC failed to join the other six agencies in reproposing the 2016 rule, along with proposed alternatives and questions for public comment. The SEC’s mandate under Section 956 is on the agency’s short-term agenda, but the Fed has stood out for its failure to take needed steps to comply with the law.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) noted the Fed’s failure saying to Powell “…I urge you to do your job.” The next day, Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) further grilled Powell on that failure, highlighting that “of all the rulemaking provisions in the Dodd-Frank, only 148 were mandatory and of those only 22 had a deadline of less than a year after enactment. Section 956 was one of them.”