• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Kathy Kraninger said in a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers that the Education Department is interfering with efforts to oversee the student loan industry. Student loan servicers have declined CFPB requests for information, which Kraninger said is necessary for proper oversight, after the Education Department issued guidance instructing the servicers to not share the information, citing privacy concerns. (NPR News)

• Big bank chief executives would be required to testify in front of Congress annually if draft legislation in the House Financial Services Committee becomes law. While the Democrat-backed bill is not likely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, the draft bill signals Democrats’ continued scrutiny of the industry. (Bloomberg) 

• The Trump administration took a series of actions targeting China’s Huawei Technologies Co., including an executive order allowing the United States to ban telecommunications gear from “foreign adversaries” and adding the company to a list of entities that pose a threat to U.S. interests. The moves came shortly after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the United States and China would “most likely” meet in Beijing to continue trade talks. (The Wall Street Journal)

Budget chairs pick former Bush official to head CBO
Niv Ellis, The Hill

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) on Thursday announced that Phillip Swagel, a University of Maryland economics professor and former Treasury official under President George W. Bush, as the next director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). “Dr. Swagel’s strong academic and government experience, as well as his knowledge and expertise in economic forecasting will serve him well as he leads CBO,” said Enzi.

House Dems: Fed should ‘enact protections’ instead of deregulating
Hannah Lang, American Banker

More than a dozen House Democrats have signed on to a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell expressing concern about the agency’s moves to roll back post-crisis regulation. The letter, also addressed to Fed Vice Chair of Supervision Randal Quarles, specifically called out several of the proposals the Fed has put forward this year, accusing the agency of having a “procyclical bias.”

Trump readies up to $20B more in aid to rescue farmers from trade war
Catherine Bourdreau and Ryan McCrimmon, Politico

The Trump administration could make as much as $20 billion available to farmers in a second round of assistance designed to help offset losses from China’s latest retaliatory tariffs, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said late Wednesday. The second installment of trade aid is being modeled after the one last year. USDA pledged up to $12 billion in assistance for 2018 production, mostly in the form of direct payments to farmers stung by retaliatory duties, as well as commodity purchases.

Who Pays the Trump Tariffs? We Do, These Americans Say
Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal

Escalating tariffs between the U.S. and China have fueled an acrimonious debate over who’s paying. President Trump says China; his critics say Americans.

Mnuchin Says He Expects Courts to Make Call on Trump Tax Returns
Richard Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he expects a federal judge to resolve the dispute over congressional access to President Trump’s tax returns, and he signaled that he and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig will defy subpoenas demanding the documents. “We haven’t made a decision, but I think you can guess which way we’re leaning on our subpoena,” said Mr. Mnuchin, who has contended that lawmakers lack a legitimate legislative purpose to receive Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

How to Prepare for the Next Recession: Automate the Rescue Plan
Neil Irwin, The New York Times

When the economy goes south, the United States traditionally has two ways of dealing with it. The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates.

U.S. Futures Turn Higher, Treasuries Erase Gain: Markets Wrap
Todd White, Bloomberg

U.S. equity futures turned higher on Thursday and Treasuries erased a gain as trade headlines continued to whipsaw global markets. European stocks also reversed a drop, while the region’s bonds held their advance.

Bank of America employees get first pay bump on road to $20 an hour minimum wage
Hugh Son, CNBC

Bank of America’s lowest-paid employees are getting their first raises promised by CEO Brian Moynihan last month. The bank said Wednesday in a release that it hiked its minimum wage to $17 an hour starting May 1, and that move is reflected in workers’ paychecks this week.

Fed’s Quarles sees strong competition in US banking sector
Robert Armstrong, Financial Times

Randall Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice-chairman for supervision, told the Senate banking committee this morning that “competition in the banking industry is as good as competition anywhere,” suggesting a sanguine attitude towards the pending $66bn merger between BB&T and SunTrust. The comments came in response to a question from the committee’s most senior Democrat, Sherrod Brown.

Citigroup Hit Hardest as EU Fines Banks $1.2 Billion in FX Probe
Aoife White and Stephanie Bodoni, Bloomberg

Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among five banks that agreed to pay European Union fines totaling 1.07 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for colluding on foreign-exchange trading strategies. Citigroup was hit hardest with a 310.8 million-euro penalty, followed by fines of 249.2 million euros and 228.8 million euros for RBS and JPMorgan, the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday.

Former JPMorgan Banker Charged With Bribing Client
Joanne Chiu, The Wall Street Journal

A Hong Kong anticorruption body charged a former executive at JPMorgan Chase JPM -0.38% & Co. with bribery, saying she bribed the chairman of a logistics company by offering to employ his son at the bank. The city’s antigraft watchdog said Catherine Leung Kar-cheung, a former managing director who worked at the bank’s Asia-Pacific securities arm, made the employment offer in connection with an initial public offering of the logistics company.

American Express to Buy Resy, a Restaurant Booking Service
Michael J. de la Merced, The New York Times

American Express has considered dining perks one of the main benefits for its card members, helping them book tables at hot spots and offering them rewards points for doing so. Now it is taking a new step into the industry — by buying the country’s biggest privately held restaurant reservation service.

Women-led hedge funds try to crack the boys’ club
Lindsay Fortado, Financial Times

When she launched an event for female hedge fund managers seven years ago, Tracy Castle-Newman, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, struggled to find any.  “I ended up with about 10 people,” she said.

Lawsuits over who should pay buyer’s agent could upend housing market
Kenneth R. Harney, The Washington Post

The long knives are out again for one of American real estate’s oldest and most controversial traditions: requiring home sellers to pay the agents who represent the buyers of their properties. A landmark suit filed in March alleged that the 1.3-million-member National Association of Realtors has conspired with local multiple listing services (MLSs) and with major realty brokerage companies to force sellers who list their homes on an MLS to pay a contractually specified percentage of the commissions to the broker/agent who brings in the ultimate buyer.

Landlords Are Raising Rents in the U.S.
Noah Buhayar and Prashant Gopal, Bloomberg

The U.S. housing slowdown is turning out to be a gift to apartment landlords. After all, those people who aren’t buying still need somewhere to live. Data from Zillow released Thursday shows that home-price appreciation continued to slow in April from a year earlier, driven in part by softening West Coast metros like San Jose and Seattle.

Intuit CEO in Internal Video: Hiding Free TurboTax Was In “Best Interest of Taxpayers”
Justin Elliot and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

Sasan Goodarzi, the CEO of Intuit, says the company’s efforts to make its free tax-filing software harder to find on Google were part of the software giant’s commitment to educating taxpayers. In an 11-minute video sent to Intuit employees, Goodarzi said the company was trying to help consumers by steering them to “educational content” instead of TurboTax’s free filing website.

Once-Taboo IRS Funding Boost Gaining Steam in Congress
Robert Lee and Kaustuv Basu, Bloomberg Law

For years, the IRS couldn’t get congressional appropriators to bite on boosting their funding. But a glaring technology need—and a change in political climate—may help secure the agency its largest budget in years. In the last five weeks, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Chuck Rettig have made their rounds on Capitol Hill asking lawmakers to boost the agency’s budget to the administration’s requested level of $11.47 billion.

IRS bringing in outside contractor on review of ‘Free File’ program
Naomi Jagoda, The Hill

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said Wednesday that the agency is engaging an outside contractor to review its “Free File” program, and that he hopes the review is completed in the next several months. “We need to get it right, and the people need to be able to file their returns,” Rettig told reporters after a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing.

N.J.’s Revenue Surprise Widens Divide Over Millionaire’s Tax
Elise Young, Bloomberg

New Jersey’s budget discord deepened as a key blocker of Governor Phil Murphy’s proposed millionaire’s tax also disagreed with his fellow Democrat’s plans for a record April revenue surge. The administration on Tuesday boosted current-year revenue forecasts by $377 million after April income-tax collections surpassed a 2008 record. Murphy, a retired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. senior director, says he’ll use some of the cash to replenish a rainy-day account that’s stood empty for more than a decade, a factor that contributed to a string of downgrades under Chris Christie, his Republican predecessor.

Fintech charter delayed following court ruling: Otting
Rachel Witkowski, American Banker

A recent court decision allowing New York’s financial regulator to proceed in a case attempting to block the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency from offering fintechs a new federal banking charter is having a chilling effect on potential applicants, OCC chief Joseph Otting said. In a recent sit-down with American Banker, Otting said he no longer expects to have a fintech firm formally apply for the new special purpose bank charter in the second quarter of the year, after a federal judge ruled May 2 that the New York State Department of Financial Services could continue with its case to invalidate the charter.

America’s Workforce Has A Caregiving Crisis
Rhett Buttle, Morning Consult

This month we celebrated National Small Business Week, which highlights the important role that small businesses play in our economy. Understanding the importance of small businesses allows for us to also identify and tackle the challenges they face as business owners and employers.

Do Companies Fear the Law? The Signs Say No
Peter J. Henning, The New York Times

Corporations cannot seem to avoid misconduct. Ford Motor recently announced a criminal probe of its emissions and fuel economy testing, federal investigators are examining Goldman Sachs’s involvement in a large-scale fraud in Malaysia, and Facebook’s legal woes with user privacy have been well documented over the past year.

Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Returns: Time-Varying Risk Regimes
Charles W. Calomiris and Harry Mamaysky, The National Bureau of Economic Research

We develop an empirical model of exchange rate returns, applied separately to samples of developed and developing economies’ currencies against the dollar. We incorporate into this model natural-language-based measures of the monetary policy stances of the large global central banks, and show that these become increasingly important in the post-crisis era.