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John Walsh
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This could be the year regulation in the securitization sector makes the leap from being all talk to finally taking action, John Walsh, acting Comptroller of the Currency, said in the featured address at the ASF2012 conference in Las Vegas Tuesday.
“I’m hopeful that 2012 is going to be the year when we wrap a lot of things up,” said Walsh, whose agency supervises 2,000 national banks and federal savings associations, 50 federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the U.S. “I’m hopeful the … enforcement actions against the large servicers basically get worked through and begin to put that behind us. That’s certainly a big rock in the road for the system and I’m hopeful we’ll really break the back of these major rule-writing projects.”
Walsh pointed to final rules for Dodd-Frank Act regulations and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s capital liquidity rules. “Hopefully, by the end of the year there will be a clearer picture of what the geography of the system is going to look like and what the contours of the regulations are going to look like,” he said.
Still, Walsh stood by the various government entities working to bring resolution to the now years-long process of interpreting Dodd-Frank, saying it’s better to take the time to get everything right the first time. “The old adage, ‘If you want it bad, you’ll get it bad,’ will certainly apply to some of these rules,” Walsh said.
One market player said he was disappointed to hear the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would continue on its path with certain rules, such as QRM. “He didn’t offer anything optimistic about the likelihood of throwing everything out and starting from scratch,” the market player told SI. “If he had, I think he would have gotten a standing ovation from a lot of people here—not that it’s within his power to do that.” He added that he appreciated the comptroller’s insistence that he hoped to put much of the uncertainty of the last few years behind us as soon as possible.