Scott Bessent pushes for lighter financial regulation at G20 meeting in Asheville

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Asheville, North Carolina with a clear message: the regulatory architecture built after the 2008 financial crisis has, over time, done more damage to small banks than it has protected them. The meeting, held August 31 through September 1 under the U.S. G20 presidency, gave Bessent a global audience for an argument that has been building inside the current administration for months. The shrinking small bank problem Bessent’s central exhibit was a number that tends to get buried in broader financial policy debates: since 2010, the U.S. has lost more than 3,600 small and community banks. That figure represents roughly half of the total that existed before the post-crisis regulatory wave took hold. The culprit, in Bessent’s telling, is the compliance burden that followed the Dodd-Frank Act. Large banks had the legal teams, the back-office infrastructure, and the capital reserves to absorb new requirements. Smaller institutions, the ones lending to the hardware store owner and the local contractor, largely did not. Bessent argued that easing capital requirements for community bank...