How Trump’s ally at the Fed is remaking bank oversight

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In September, President Trump’s pick to oversee banking supervision at the Federal Reserve met with the top officials from the central bank’s 12 regional districts and delivered a rebuke. The staff of the Fed’s quasi-independent regional banks are the ones who conduct most of its banking exams, ensuring the nation’s financial institutions are stable.

Michelle Bowman, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, wanted a new direction for supervision, in part to ease the burden on banks. Some regional examiners apparently hadn’t received the message. Bowman made clear that, notwithstanding the Fed’s sometimes opaque chain of command, she was in charge and expected examiners to get on board, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Some of those present left unhappy with the message and what they took as a dressing-down, the people said. The meeting was an opening shot by Bowman, a former banker from Kansas who had developed a reputation for butting heads with fellow governors and staff after being appointed to the Fed’s board during Trump’s first term. Bowman, who projects a Midwesterner’s approachability—instructing people she meets to call her “Miki"—outmaneuvered skeptics including Fed Chair Jerome Powell last year to secure the vice chair position.

Now she is moving to roll back what she and many in the Trump administration view as the regulatory excesses that followed the 2008-09 financial crisis. “We have to take the financial system out of this straitjacket," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who interviewed Bowman last fall as he sought candidates to succeed Powell, said on Fox Business in December. Bowman has slashed staff and pursued what many inside and outside the central