President Donald Trump plans to nominate Randal Quarles, a senior Treasury official in the Bush administration, to be the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator, according to a person familiar with the selection process.
Currently a managing director at a Salt Lake City-based private equity firm, Quarles would bring a background in both domestic and international finance to the role, said the person who asked not to be named because no final decision has been made. He also has years of experience as a banking lawyer.
Trump’s expected nomination of Quarles would put an end to what has been a long, and sometimes arduous, search for the Fed’s vice chair of supervision. The Senate-confirmed post has great sway over JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other large banks. Quarles would be expected to play a pivotal role in carrying out Trump’s pledge to ease some of the regulatory constraints that were put on banks after the 2008 financial crisis.
The selection would reflect “the pendulum shifting from tougher regulation to neutral,” Mike Mayo, an independent bank analyst, said in a Monday interview with Bloomberg Television.
Wealthy Families
Quarles, 59, joined the Treasury in 2002 as an assistant secretary for international affairs. He was later elevated to undersecretary for domestic finance. At the end of 2006, Quarles left the department and went to Carlyle Group LP where he specialized in investing in the financial services industry. Prior to his time in George W. Bush’s administration, Quarles was a partner at the Davis, Polk & Wardwell law firm.
He graduated from Columbia University and has a degree from Yale Law School.
In his current post at the Cynosure Group, Quarles helps invest money from wealthy families, including the Eccles family of Utah.
Quarles is married to Hope Eccles. Another member of the family, Marriner Eccles, was Fed chairman from 1934 to 1948, and one of the buildings at the central bank’s Washington headquarters is named after him.
If confirmed by the Senate, Quarles might pursue a measured approach to revamping bank rules implemented under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, rather than a wholesale dismantling of them.
In a May 2015 interview with Bloomberg Television, he said a lot of provisions in the law were poorly designed, but he conceded that it will be “with us for a long time.” Quarles added that he was sympathetic to some of the post-crisis pressures that led to Congress approving Dodd-Frank, while arguing that in some ways the legislation didn’t go far enough.
“You could have responded to those pressures with a more aggressive restructuring of the financial-regulatory structure of the country without some of the particular provisions that aren’t well designed and were included for political rather than financial-regulatory reasons," he said in the Bloomberg interview.