Foreign banks have expressed similar concerns about U.S. regulatory initiatives in the past. At the Federal Reserve, we have found that our open and transparent regulatory process is crucial in helping us to understand how our proposals affect foreign banks and where problems arise, and gives us useful information for evaluating the merits of particular complaints.
We have at times proposed regulations on which foreign banks and their governments, including the European Commission, filed adverse comments. These comments helped us to reevaluate our regulations and to determine whether our supervisory and regulatory objectives could be achieved in a different way, consistent with the principle of national treatment.