Trump should reform financial watchdogs. Here’s how

News that President-elect Donald Trump's team wants to hack away at the forbidding tangle of U.S. bank regulation is welcome in the abstract. In practice, though, much will depend on the details. The goal should be simplifying financial oversight more broadly — not just defanging a tough watchdog.

No doubt, the current system is unwieldy. At the federal level — excluding an array of separate state regulators — three entities oversee banks, two supervise markets, one aims to protect consumers and another defends against financial crimes. Many large institutions must submit to all of them. Senior managers of an average bank today spend some 42% of their time on compliance-related tasks. Worse, such fragmentation at times allows risks to fall through the cracks.

Much of this system was designed decades ago for a simpler world. One glaring example is the separation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. One was established 90 years ago to protect investors in securities such as stocks and bonds; the other was created 50 years ago to oversee commodities markets and related futures and options contracts.

Today, when many financial companies trade in both markets, the two supervisors often overlap and don't always properly communicate. In 2011, after the chaotic bankruptcy of derivatives broker MF Global Holdings Ltd., a congressional postmortem detailed how the commissions failed to coordinate their approach to the company's deteriorating finances and disagreed about where to safeguard its customers' money.

Such bifurcation is anomalous by global standards, and policymakers have been talking about combining the two for decades. In a familiar tale, however, politics has taken precedence over common sense: The House Committee on Agriculture has been loath to cede its oversight of the CFTC, which attracts hefty campaign donations from financial companies. (The SEC is under the House Financial Services Committee.)

If Trump wants a relatively clear-cut reform, this would be a good place to start. Merging the two commissions would help streamline the rules, reduce compliance costs and ease cooperation with regulators overseas. It would be an ambitious change but not a radical one: Both a former CFTC commissioner and a current SEC commissioner have endorsed the idea.

Reforming banking oversight would be less straightforward. It's true that the U.S. has too many regulators — including the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — in addition to state banking authorities. But this morass defies easy fixes; simply folding the FDIC into the Treasury Department, as the Trump team is considering, will likely create more problems than it solves.

A better approach would be to create a single prudential authority charged with protecting the financial system. The new body could be overseen by a board that includes representatives from the Fed, the Treasury and the FDIC, while doing away with the OCC entirely. Ideally it would also oversee nonbank companies, such as asset managers, that play a significant role in the system. Such a regulator could focus more on essential risks than on box-checking exercises or turf wars. It would be less susceptible to influence by the companies it oversees and could (in theory) allow for streamlined compliance. It would also make clear where the buck stops when things go wrong.

Such far-reaching reforms would require political skill and sustained effort, which were not hallmarks of Trump's previous term. The ambition is laudable all the same. In regulation as in life, simplicity is a virtue.