Disturbing Article from ProPublica: Trump’s New Bank Regulator: Lawyer Who Helped Banks Charge More Fees

Here.  As we have noted before, the OCC plays a role in consumer protection, such as joining with the CFPB and LA City Attorney in the investigation into the Wells Fargo phony accounts.  The whole article is worth a read, but here is an excerpt:

In the early 2000s, banks successfully sued to stop Iowa from limiting their ability to charge ATM fees to non-customers. They also fought off states’ attempts to stop them from charging non-customers to cash checks drawn on the banks’ accounts. In another case, they stopped California from forcing two banks to conduct audits of their own residential mortgages.

What do all these cases have in common? The winning argument in each was that states had no right to impose their laws on federally regulated national banks. And the man who helped make that powerful argument was Keith Noreika — President Trump’s pick to head the federal agency that oversees national banks.

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Noreika is following in the footsteps of his mentor, John Dugan, who worked with Noreika at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling — before himself leaving to head the OCC from 2005 to 2010.

Under Dugan, the OCC was criticized as being too friendly to banks in the face of widespread lending abuses that fueled the financial crisis. While Noreika now heads up the OCC, Dugan is back at Covington, where his bio says he “advises clients on a range of legal matters affected by significantly increased regulatory requirements resulting from the financial crisis.”