KC’s Tom Hoenig still on Trump’s purported short list for bank supervision job

Former Kansas City Fed president Tom Hoenig continues to pop up in published reports about President Donald Trump’s likely candidates for a key bank supervision post.

Hoenig ran the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City until retiring in 2011 on the 20th anniversary of his appointment as its president. He currently serves as vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

An article in the Wall Street Journal Friday listed Hoenig along with a former Goldman Sachs official and a “veteran Wall Street lawyer” as leading candidates for the post in question.

Trump is looking for the nation’s first Federal Reserve vice chairman for supervision, as that job has remained vacant since it was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed in the wake of the financial crisis.

Hoenig was on a short list of purported candidates in a December Journal article, along with a retired banker and a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Journal’s other two December candidates did not make its new short list with Hoenig. Two new names did: Gary Cohn, who is the head of Trump’s National Economic Council and formerly of Goldman Sachs, and Thomas Vartanian, an attorney with experience at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Hoenig also was on a different short list of candidates that banking industry consultant Bert Ely recounted in a January commentary for The Hill.

During more than 36 years at the Kansas City Fed, Hoenig had direct involvement in handling the farm banking crisis of the 1980s, resolving the 1982 collapse of a tiny Oklahoma City bank that had flooded bigger banks with risky oil loans, and two decades of debating and voting on the nation’s monetary policy as a member of the central bank’s open market committee, which is the one that raised interest rates on Wednesday.

Hoenig has long advocated for a return to policies that separate banking and investment banking activities, which had been in place before the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. He proposed an updated version of Glass-Steagall this week in an article published by the American Banker.

The Journal article Friday cited Hoenig’s new Glass-Steagall proposal after commenting that he “seems to be openly campaigning” for the bank supervision job at the Federal Reserve.

Politically, Hoenig has not declared his affiliation though he has said that he is proud to be called a populist “because that’s the common sense.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 2:56 PM with the headline "KC’s Tom Hoenig still on Trump’s purported short list for bank supervision job."