By Jeff Mason and Pete Schroeder
WASHINGTON, March 17 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday called on Congress to give regulators more power over the banking industry, impose higher fines on executives, claw back executive pay and ban bankrupt bank officials, according to a statement from the White House.
“No one is above the law,” Biden said in the statement, “and strengthening accountability is a major barrier to future mismanagement.”
The current law “limits the administration’s power to hold executives accountable,” he said.
Specifically, Biden is calling on Congress to give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation greater authority to recover compensation, “including stock sale proceeds, from executives of failed banks such as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank,” the White House said in a second statement.
Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker sold $3.6 million worth of stock in late February, about two weeks before the bank went into FDIC receivership, Bloomberg and CNBC reported.
“The President urges Congress to expand the powers of the FDIC to specifically cover cases like this,” the White House statement read, citing Becker’s stock sales.
The president also calls on Congress to give the FDIC more power to exclude bank executives from the industry when their institutions go into receivership and to fine executives of those who fail. (Reporting by Jeff Mason and Costas Pitas Editing in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)