WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator JD Vance (R-OH) delivered remarks on his amendment to the RECOUP Act, which passed during a markup of the Senate Banking Committee today.
“The burden of our financial system falls heaviest on the small and midsize banks,” said Senator Vance. “The amendment that we proposed would mean that if the FDIC takes a bank into receivership, we only allow a massive bank to buy the failed bank’s assets unless there’s no other alternative and there’s no other buyer on the table.”
Watch Senator Vance’s remarks here:
Senator Vance: “We have a problem in this country. The problem is that a banking system that has largely worked for a lot of small businesses, the three tier banking system, where you have the big banks, you have a lot of regional banks that are that do important financial services, but you also have community banks that do a lot of lending services that nobody else is willing to do – that system is under threat.
“One of the things that we learned from the SVB crisis and much of the fallout is that the big banks have a lower cost of capital. They’re able to absorb these things. But if that leads to concentration and if we don’t do anything to stop it, we’re going to wake up in a country that has three or four massive banks and no small and regional banks for our financial system.
“That’s a disaster for our country. It’s a disaster for our small businesses and our consumers. We should do more to try to preserve the regional banking system of our country. I think it’s good for our people, it’s good for our country, and we don’t want to be like Europe, where they just have two or three massive national banks and no other alternatives for their consumers.”
###