OCC nominee to testify amid uncertainty about chances in Senate | American Banker

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration's controversial nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will testify next week before the Senate Banking Committee.

Saule Omarova, a law professor at Cornell University and former Treasury Department official, was named by the White House in September as its pick to lead the national bank regulator. But even though her nomination has been cheered by progressives, Omarova has been a target of criticism from Republican lawmakers, some Democrats and the banking industry over views that they describe as worrisome.

The Senate Banking Committee, led by Chair Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, will convene at 9:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, Nov. 18, to hear Omarova testify.

Brown has been a powerful supporter of Omarova’s candidacy to lead the OCC. But analysts see an extremely narrow road for her confirmation in a 50-50 Senate, just one Democratic dissent will be enough to sink her chances.

Omarova, a former Davis Polk attorney who served in the George W. Bush Treasury Department before becoming an academic, has expressed some skepticism about nonbank fintech firms, cryptocurrency and of large-bank mergers.

Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs

She’s well known among academics for her financial scholarship, including a history of how the OCC gradually allowed banks to engage in derivatives trading.

Progressives say Omarova would be an appropriate choice to lead the OCC, an agency that the political left has accused for years of being too deferential to the sector it regulates.

By the same token, Omarova’s nomination has generated significant backlash among Republicans and bank advocates, who have pointed to some of her writings as evidence of radicalism and even prejudice against the financial services sector.

As an academic, Omarova has argued for a substantial restructuring of the financial system, including moving customer deposits en masse to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. (Omarova would not be able to pursue such reforms as a Senate-confirmed comptroller.)

Thursday’s Senate hearing could be contentious. Republicans have accused Omarova’s ideas of flirting with communism and have gone so far as to demand college economic papers she wrote as a student at Moscow State University in the late 1980s. Brown has derided the attacks as “red scare McCarthyism."