Ball and Dodd Funeral Home

It was that risky activity that led to multibillion-dollar bailouts of several big U.S. banks during the financial crisis. The Fed’s proposal is the latest in a steady stream of efforts by the Trump administration to roll back reforms made by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the law enacted after the financial crisis. The banks, and the Trump administration, blame Dodd-Frank for stifling economic growth, despite more banks being profitable now than at any time in the last twenty years. Read: After tax cuts, more banks are profitable than at any time in the past two decades The Volcker Rule is supposed to limit proprietary trading, defined by law as “engaging as a principal to trade debt and equity securities, commodities, derivatives, or other financial instruments for the trading account of a banking organization or supervised nonbank financial company.” Doug Landy, a partner with law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and a key advisor to banks during the financial crisis and after, told MarketWatch that the Fed’s revisions to the Volcker rule will be “incremental, not revolutionary.” That won’t appease critics. Andy Green, managing director of economic policy for the Center for American Progress, told MarketWatch, “Unfortunately, from all indications, the Volcker 2.0 proposal hacks away at the principle that banks ought to be in the business of serving their customers and the real economy. Moreover, at a time in the economic cycle when regulators ought to be guarding against macroprudential risks to jobs and economic growth – and the evidence is that liquidity in the bond markets is as good as or better than prior to the crisis – making it easier for banks to engage in swing-for-the-fence bets seems very hard to justify from a rational basis.” Banks have been saying since 2013, when the Volcker Rule was enacted, that it’s too vague, making compliance too difficult. In the meantime, the biggest banks have diges...

S. President Donald Trump with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (R), speaks about the cancelled summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during a bill signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room. The bank deregulation bill that gives major banks — outside of money-center giants — a measure of relief from post-crisis reforms was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Thursday morning. The law, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, enacts some key changes to the Dodd-Frank law passed in 2010 and lightens the banks’ regulatory burden but also help set the stage for agencies to act further, analysts say. The law includes breaks that essentially eliminate the possibility of designation as a systemically important financial institution for all but the biggest banks, by raising the threshold from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets. That relieves BB&T BBT, +1.33%  , SunTrust Banks Inc. STI, +1.47%   and HSBC USA ...