WASHINGTON — Sen. Jon Tester of Montana told bankers on Tuesday a long-awaited bill to help the financial services industry transition away from Libor could be enacted as soon as this week and urged Congress to greenlight cannabis banking as soon as possible.
Speaking during the American Bankers Association Washington summit on Wednesday morning, Tester, a Democrat, said a legislative fix for the transition from the London interbank offered rate would be included in an omnibus spending package for the 2022 fiscal year, which lawmakers are looking to pass by the end of the week. The inclusion was
For years, bankers and regulators have asked Congress to address the sunsetting of Libor, the now-defunct interest rate benchmark referenced in trillions of dollars' worth of adjustable-rate contracts.
The omnibus package's Libor fix mirrors the text of the
“It’s not something that’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue when they’re talking about it, but we did get it put in the omnibus bill,” Tester said on Wednesday morning, “which means by the end of this week, by tomorrow night, it should be passed or should be well on its way.”
Later in the conversation, Tester appeared to break with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on the trajectory of cannabis policy. Rather than pursuing full cannabis reform legalization, Tester urged lawmakers to “just pass the SAFE Banking Act” — a bill sponsored by Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., that would provide a safe harbor for regulated financial institutions to work with cannabis companies without the risk of enforcement penalty.
The House has passed the SAFE Banking Act six times since 2019 on a bipartisan basis, but the measure has never received a Senate vote.
“When I leave here, we’re having a discussion among just Democrats today,” Tester said, “and I’m gonna get ahold of Schumer and ask him why we can’t bring it to the floor. I just think it needs to happen.”
After Tester’s remarks, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., was asked about the ongoing Republican boycott of the Biden administration’s nominees to the Federal Reserve. Republicans have denied Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee a voting quorum since mid-February in opposition to Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Treasury official and Fed governor who the White House tapped to be the Fed’s next vice chair for supervision.
Moran disputed that Republicans, led by Sen. Toomey, R-Pa., were holding up Raskin’s confirmation vote — stalling four other nominees in the process, including Powell — solely because of her views on the role of climate risk in financial regulation.
“I will vote against Sarah Bloom Raskin. I wouldn't hold up the committee actually having a meeting to do that only for the purposes that I'm opposed to her,” Moran said. “I'm not the guy who walks out of a committee and keeps us from doing our job. I'm happy and willing to go to the committee and have a vote and let the votes fall where they may.”
Instead, Moran insisted that Republicans opposed Raskin because she “has declined to answer questions in writing and to be forthright in her testimony before the banking committee.”
Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has forcefully disputed that claim, saying in a Senate floor speech earlier in March that Raskin and the other Fed nominees had answered “every question submitted for the record, more than 200 of them.”
But Moran said that he wasn’t trying to “stop the Senate from doing its business.”
“I'm trying to allow us to do our business with the knowledge of information that we're entitled to before we make a decision about an important nomination that has long-term consequences,” Moran said.
Moran then returned to the topic he had claimed moments before was not the reason Republicans were boycotting her confirmation vote: managing climate risk in financial regulation.
“The idea of the Federal Reserve engaging itself in determining credit policies toward any business or segment of the economy is an anathema to me,” Moran said. “For the Federal Reserve to get into what I'm quite certain are legislative decisions about fossil fuels is a terrible path for us to go down.”
