The US Federal Reserve – their central banking system – wants to get rid of one of the key regulations put into place after the financial crash, because it's 'too complex'. Uh-oh.
What it means: Post-2008, banks were obviously under a lot of pressure to make sure that whole shebang never happened again.
Recap: In a very summarised nutshell, banks work by taking the money we deposit into them and trading it to make more money. One of the reasons the crash happened is they got carried away betting people's money on deals that never came through, and then losing it all.
The Volcker Rule, one of the regulations to come out of the crash, basically said banks had to prove that the investments they were making were genuinely useful for a client, not just speculative gambles.
But the six biggest banks in America have lobbied to change the rule, saying it's too complex, muddled, and difficult to comply with. Under a new proposal from the Federal Reserve, banks would monitor internally, rather than have to prove themselves to governments.
Nothing's been decided yet – the proposal's got to go through a few more agencies first. But people are already getting worried: even Volcker himself has come out and said he's all for making things simpler, as long as we don't end up rolling right back to where we started, and causing another crash.
