(Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has challenged bankers to give him specifics on their longstanding complaint that the Dodd-Frank Act is imposing costly, confusing and burdensome regulations on them, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The Federal Advisory Council, a group of bank executives from each of the 12 Federal Reserve districts, complained to Geithner at a May 10 meeting about overlapping and duplicative rules, according to the people. Geithner urged the bankers to prepare a study with examples of regulatory burden, said the people, who are preparing the report.
Geithner offered to use his ability to reach across agencies to better coordinate and streamline rules if he found the report convincing, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the study. The complaints include the handling of so-called stress tests of banks’ ability to weather a crisis, capital requirements and restrictions on mortgage servicing.
“It’s a helpful step,” said Joe Engelhard, senior vice president of Washington-based investment advisory firm Capital Alpha Partners LLC and a former Treasury official. Dodd-Frank is“overly complicated and excessive in certain areas, but I like what Geithner is saying of identifying where it is overly complicated and we’ll work on that.”
