Biden to nominate Michael Barr as Fed bank regulator

President Joe Biden will nominate Michael Barr, a former Treasury Department official, to be the Federal Reserve’s top regulator in charge of big banks.

The choice of Barr was expected after CNBC earlier in the week confirmed that he was the White House’s frontrunner for the post. It would make the leading financial laws author perhaps the most powerful U.S. bank regulator: the Fed vice chair of supervision.

Barr served as assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions during the Obama administration, where he helped design the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. That law was one of the most expansive overhauls of financial regulation in U.S. history and came on the heels of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Among its many provisions aimed at protecting the economy from future calamity, Dodd-Frank produced both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Fed’s vice chair for supervision.

“He was instrumental in the passage of Dodd-Frank, to ensure a future financial crisis would not create devastating economic hardship for working families,” Biden said in a statement Friday morning accompanying the formal White House announcement.

“He understands that this job is not a partisan one, but one that plays a critical role in regulating our nation’s financial institutions to ensure Americans are treated fairly and to protect the stability of our economy,” Biden added.

The president also underscored the fact that Barr received support from both Democrats and Republicans when he was previously confirmed by the Senate.

That may be an oblique acknowledgement of the difficulties the administration has faced in trying to advance some of its nominees for financial regulatory posts in a Senate split 50-50.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s first pick to be the Fed’s bank regulator, withdrew her candidacy last month. She removed herself from consideration after West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, said he would not support her nomination due to her views on climate change and energy policy ideas.

Barr himself had last year been considered as Biden’s pick to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. But progressive Democrats, concerned by what they viewed as his cozy ties to Wall Street, snuffed out his candidacy.

The White House later chose Saule Omarova to replace Barr as its nominee to lead the OCC until she was forced to withdraw in November as a result of skepticism from moderate Democrats Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana.

In tapping Barr again, the White House is betting that Raskin’s withdrawal at the hands of…