WASHINGTON — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair is pushing back against key pillars of the Obama administration’s financial overhaul plan, saying they wouldn’t survive in Congress and calling her own alternatives more viable.
In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Bair said Congress won’t approve two major parts of the package: expanding the Federal Reserve’s authority to regulate the largest financial companies and giving a proposed new consumer protection agency examination and enforcement powers over banks.
Such authority now belongs to her agency and other bank regulators.
“There’s a lot of resistance from a lot of different quarters to a lot of the things the administration has submitted,” Bair said. “That is a reality the administration needs to deal with.”
Bair said alternatives she has backed would “provide a framework that can actually get through Congress.” Her ideas include empowering a new agency to protect consumers from abusive mortgage and credit-card products — but having bank supervisors enforce those rules.
She said she supports “90 percent” of what the administration has proposed. But on giving the new agency enforcement powers, she said, “I just don’t think that works.”
