Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) is here to serve Arkansas…or at least its wealthiest residents.
While she finalizes new rules on derivative trading, which have been well received by pro-Wall Street reformers, she’s undertaking separate efforts to protect a major Arkansas bank from a different part of the financial reform bill.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Lincoln is hoping to make one of the bill’s provisions apply only to banks with $15 billion in assets, thus exempting Arvest Bank Group, largely owned by the same Walton family that founded Wal-Mart.
The details are pretty esoteric. The bill’s negotiators were hoping to forbid banks with $10 billion or more in assets from counting a class of securities known as trust-preferred securities as part of their capital reserves. Lincoln, according to the Journal is trying to raise that threshold to $15 billion. If she succeeds, she’ll save Arvest from having to raise about $115 million.
It should be noted that the change would also help nearly two dozen other banks across the country. And a Lincoln spokesperson told the Journal that Lincoln “believes the threshold should be high enough to ensure no bank in Arkansas is subject to these new rules on existing capital, which would hinder their ability to generate lending for consumers and businesses at a time when access to credit is already difficult to come by.”
Lincoln is facing the re-election fight of her life, down double digits to Republican John Boozman, with only months to go until November.
