U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. officially announced his office’s plan to streamline the nation’s financial regulatory structure by creating new oversight in areas such as mortgage lending and by combining the efforts of existing agencies like the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC), as well as the efforts and philosophies of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Paulson also wants to further empower the President’s Working Group (PWG) on Financial Markets by adding the OCC, OTS and the FDIC to its roster and by allowing the PWG to take a more active role in communicating issues related to financial policy, assessing and communicating risk and partaking in discussions related to investor and consumer protection, the U.S. Treasury department said in a press statement Monday.

Paulson’s plan, which has been the talk of the financial sector for two days, also proposes the creation of the Mortgage Origination Commission (MOC) — an oversight agency that will be run by a presidential appointee. The agency will be responsible for providing evaluations, ratings and reports on every state’s current licensing system as well as their regulatory practices on the origination end of the business.
“We should and can have a structure that is designed for the world we live in, one that is more flexible, one that can better adapt to change, one that will allow us to more effectively deal with inevitable market disruptions and one that will better protect investors and consumers,” Paulson said.
Paulson’s plan also proposes that the Federal Reserve should have access to information about non-depository institutions that have access to government loans. He says this new oversight would allow for additional federal regulatory activity such as on-site visits or other compliance measures as proposed by the Federal Reserve.
Other Parts of the BluePrint include:
making sure lending to non-depository agencies is “calibrated and transparent”
transitioning the thrift charter to the national bank charter to make sure residential mortgage loans are accessible.
Create an optional federal charter for insurance as a means of creating a competitive U.S. industry
Click here to read the entire “BluePrint for a Stronger Regulatory Structure.”
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