Trump's FSOC Works With MetLife to End SIFI Court Fight

The Financial Stability Oversight Council has cleared up any remaining uncertainty about its position on MetLife Inc.’s significance to the financial system.

FSOC has joined with MetLife to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to cancel FSOC’s appeal in the fight over whether MetLife should be classified as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI).

FSOC and MetLife filed a motion seeking voluntary dismissal of the appeal Thursday.

“There are no outstanding fees due to the court, and the parties have agreed that each shall bear its own costs on appeal,” FSOC and MetLife told the court.

Eugene Scalia of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher L.L.P. is listed as the counsel of record for MetLife.

FSOC listed a team of five lawyers. Daniel Tenny, a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice civil division, provided the attestation that MetLife agreed with the filing’s content, and Tenny certified that the document was 72 words long.

Tenny told the court he counted the document’s words with the word-count function of Microsoft Word 2013.

A copy of the motion is available here.

FSOC

The Great Recession began in 2007, after many home buyers defaulted on their mortgages, and after some mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and other instruments typical members of Congress knew little about went bad.

Drafters of the Dodd-Frank Act created FSOC in response to the Great Recession.

The Dodd-Frank drafters hoped FSOC could warn federal policymakers about any entity, including entities other than banks, that could somehow bring down the world financial system.

When FSOC developed rules for identifying SIFIs, during the administration of former President Barack Obama, it made the rules flexible and the determination system secretive, in an effort to keep problem entities from gaming the system.

Early on, some insurers praised FSOC’s efforts to identify and monitor SIFIs.