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Treasury Secretary Bessent Calls for a Fundamental Reset of Bank Regulation at the Community Bank Conference

October 28, 2025 · Federal Reserve · 0:14:52

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addressed the Community Bank Conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Board, opening by noting the government was still shut down because the Senate had refused to support the clean funding bill passed by the House weeks earlier, and saying the administration is eager to reopen the government, as he stated it. He thanked Vice Chair Bowman for arranging the conference and said they are committed to protecting community banks’ role in the financial system, according to his remarks.

Bessent said regulation has gradually suffocated the banks closest to the people who work the jobs, pay the bills and take out the loans that fuel growth in small-town America, and that earlier this year he called for a fundamental reset of financial regulation so regulations no longer entrench big banks and empower Washington bureaucrats, as he stated it. He described the administration’s course as strengthening both the shop floor and the trading floor — an era of, in his phrase, parallel prosperity in which Main Street and Wall Street grow together — with community bankers laying the foundation one loan, one family and one small business at a time, and his job as making it easier for them to do theirs, according to his remarks.

Citing the costs of the post-crisis framework, Bessent said that since 2010 the country has lost 3,600 community banks, a reduction of over 45 percent; that community banks’ share of bank assets has fallen from 23 to 15 percent, their share of outstanding loans from 27 to 20 percent, and their share of CRA loans from 52 to 41 percent; and that de novo chartering has averaged just six new banks per year since 2010, compared with more than 100 a year before 2008, as he stated the figures. He said Dodd-Frank’s purpose was to end too-big-to-fail but that it ended up creating, in his phrase, too small to succeed, entrenching the largest banks and hollowing out the American heartland, according to his remarks. These are Bessent’s own remarks at the conference; no Federal Reserve official or FOMC proceeding is featured.

Why it matters

The speech is Treasury’s fullest statement of its community-bank deregulation case, built on the decline figures Bessent cited — 3,600 banks lost since 2010 and de novo charters down to six a year, as he stated them — and on his ‘parallel prosperity’ framing for Main Street and Wall Street.

Sources: Federal Reserve, “Community Bank Conference: Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent”, 2025-10-28 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-10-28). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.