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This is your weekly Washington Policy Pulse on the Balance of Power podcast. I'm Joe Matthew. Every Monday, Bloomberg Intelligence senior policy analyst and friend of the show, Nathan Dean shares his weekly call on upcoming catalysts in the nation's capital. Listen for the most recent and relevant policy research from our team at Bloomberg Intelligence. Now with today's installment, here's Nathan Dean.

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Good morning and good afternoon and welcome back again to the Washington Policy Post. My name is Nathan Dean. I'm a senior policy analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence here in the DC Office. Want to welcome those of you who are attending the call and also welcome the Balance of Power podcast listeners that are coming in afterwards. And I always if you want to have access to this call, please don't feel free to reach out and I will get you added to that. So the first thing I want to talk about is President Trump's Truth social post from just this morning. And we're recording this at 10:00am Eastern on Monday, September 15th, where he called for the SEC to do away with quarterly reporting and move to a six month basis. Now this is something the SEC has actually looked at before. President Trump actually voiced this same idea back in 2018. And at that point in December 2018, the SEC under former SEC chairman Jay Clayton, put out a request for comment asking if this is a good idea or not. Now, under the securities Exchange Act act of 1934, it requires the SEC to collect quarterly reporting. But based off of our reading, it seems a little bit that, you know, instead of look, if you're going to require a quarterly report, well, does it have to have everything in it or does it just have a little bit of in there? So we do see that there's some flexibility the SEC could move forward to embark an idea that, you know, yes, you may have to collect a quarterly report, but you could also potentially go to a six month basis report. So under that idea, we do anticipate the SEC is going to move forward with some type of action here. Now look, I don't know if the SEC had any staff working on this at the moment. I would note that this was a Project 2025 idea and I even had a discussion with my team lead on Friday because there was some rumblings that this was going to happen. I didn't anticipate President Trump coming so public this morning. So we have been hearing around Washington that this is something that was brewing. So it really depends on what the SEC has already been doing on the on this. So if you take the approach that the SEC hasn't been doing all that much on it, then I think it's going to take them six to nine to put out either another request for comment or what is known as advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, let's call that coming out in the first half of next year. Now I think more likely than not would be an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, which is the first step of a long process, as you've heard me talk about before, that leads to a finalized rule. So if this ANPR comes out in the first half of next year and it suggests we're going to move to a semiannual reporting basis, well then you're looking at a proposal probably within the tail end of 2026 and finalization prob in the mid to late 2027, well before the next administration. Because that's what happened in this first scenario where the companies or the SEC put out this request for comment and then essentially ran out of time. Now under that 2018 proposal or the request for comment, most of the comments actually at the time and I had to pull up my old piece from 2018 here, most of the commenters at that point actually thought that moving to a semi annual basis was not a good thing. But I would also point out that NASDAQ put out a survey at the time and they surveyed 183 businesses and 75% of them thought that moving to a semi annual basis was a good thing. So I do think that there is some there there with this and so stay tuned. You know, obviously I don't think you're going to see anything happen in the next month or so, but it's certainly feasible towards the beginning of next year. You could hear rumblings from the SEC that they are going to release something on this and we're going to move forward. So again, stay tuned. And I would also note that back in 2018 there was a little bit of disconnect between what President Trump was calling and what several of the companies were calling for at that. There were a lot of companies and there was a letter signed by many of them, General Electric and Berkshire Hathaway and so forth. That called for the elimination of guidance, not the elimination of quarterly reports, but the elimination of guidance. So two separate things. Next thing I want to talk about is a shutdown update. So, you know, I am still at a 40% chance of a government shutdown. I was actually at one of my flag football games over the weekend. Friend of mine, government contractor, came up, said, hey, are we going to shut down? I want to know because I have to pay my guys if, you know, if something happens. And I said, look, I'm still at a 40% chance. There's a lot of rhetoric and if anything, I'm probably a little bit too high that, the 40%. I actually think it could go a little bit lower, but I'm going to stick at that 40% for now. And the reason why I still don't think we're going to have a shutdown is because the Republicans under the House Republicans are anticipated to be releasing their continuing resolution language potentially as soon as during the middle of this call. Could also come out tomorrow. And any time of fact where you get a clean ish continuing resolution, I say clean ish because there could be some policy writers in there. But if you get a clean ish continuing resolution, in this case, it would run right into November, right before the Thanksgiving holiday. You know, the party that opposes the cleanish resolution, you know, Canadian resolution, generally gets the blame from this. So the way I think it's going to play out right now is that the House is going to try and do their cleanish resolution this week. Now, we've already seen two nos, and they can afford to lose two, but you can't have three. Representative Massie has said he's a no, he's a no. He's not going to come back. He's a no. And then we had Representative Sparts from Indiana come out just last night and say that she's a no. But she, she has the tendency to change her mind at the last minute. So unlike Representative Massie, she's not as a heart of a no. She is a no right now, but she can probably move to a yes depending on how this language works. And then the House passes it. They potentially could work through the weekend and then they send it to the Senate. We do have a challenge from a timing perspective. The Rosh Hashanah holiday is next week, so Congress is out for quite a bit. And then the Senate would come back and they need pretty much every day they can get in order to get this through unless they have unanimous, unanimous consent by September 30th. But again, I think the Democrats are going to get pushed in a box here and they may, because look, if you're going to get a cleanish continuing resolution that keeps it open until November, as long as there's not massive policy writers in there, I think the Democrats are going to have to take that into account. A couple other things going on. Reconciliation 2.0. You've heard me talk on this call before about this idea of reconciliation 2.0. You know, you have the one big beautiful bill that passed back in June and then you have what some folks are calling the two big two beautiful bill. I would just call you out that Bloomberg Television had Jason Smith, who's the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee on TV last week and he essentially said, look, I don't think it's going to happen. And he is the chief tax policy writer, not writer, writer in Washington. And he's the one saying, I'm not exactly sure it's going to happen, then I'm not exactly sure it's going to happen. Obviously there are working groups around town that are looking at this. But again, stay tuned. I'm not sure the reconciliation 2.0 is going to be able to go forward. Dr. Miron, to be the next Fed governor over at the Federal Reserve, is going to get his votes tonight. You're going to see the Senate move forward on a bunch of nominees. After last week they actually moved forward with this nuclear option to cut down the time of how much you can move nominees through the process. So anticipate him to be voting this week on the Federal Reserve's Fed meeting. Bloomberg News is also reporting that there is a TikTok deal in the works that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen has said that they've created a deal framework with TikTok. We're still waiting on the details on that. But you know, we would just caution that, you know, this May week, this may be the week that if you're a Bloomberg terminal client, you want to talk to my colleague Matt Shettenhelm, he's our TMT analyst. He's been looking at a lot of this because you have a TikTok deal and also you have a significant amount of, maybe not significant amount of impact, but just a little bit more folks on the conservative side saying we need to take a look at social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk's shooting and assass. You know, I was just talking with Matt this morning. He's just Put out his research. And you know, there aren't many tools that policymakers have that they can come down onto social media companies. So again, this is something where I would just say this is more of a long term threat. But if you want to talk to Matt, Matt's always willing to talk about that. And then the last thing I just want to talk about, actually two last things. One, President Trump goes to the United Kingdom this week. So anticipate a little bit more headlines coming from London. And then finally I want a Senate Banking Committee hearing that happened last week on deposit insurance. So if you're, if you're a bank investor, this is what you care about. So you know, if you go back to Silicon Valley bank and First Republic and these ideas of when these banks folded, well, you know, any American, if you have a checking account, you have a $250,000 limit or a $250,000 protection from deposit insurance. And in the wake of those failures, we saw for, you know, a significant amount the FDIC had to tackle into the deposit insurance fund, the dif, in order to pay back those investors or those retail holders that needed to be made whole. And it was significant for the large banks that pay into the dif, it's based off of asset size and deposits. And so therefore the JP Morgan's, the Wells Fargo's and the bank of America's are the ones that pay more into this than your small mom and pop banks. So there's this idea that rather than having the $250,000 threshold, maybe we should increase it to business payment accounts. And there is legislation that's coming out from Senator Hagerty of Tennessee, co sponsored with Senator also Brooks of Maryland. So you got Republican and a Democrat. They actually tried to attach it to the NDA as an amendment. Didn't go anywhere. But this legislation is coming out that would raise the deposit insurance limit for these business payment accounts to $20 million. Now the question is if you're going to raise the limit, you're going to have to raise the dif. And who pays that? The big banks. So last week we had a hearing and going into this hearing I didn't think it was going to be all that big of a deal because I just thought, look, this has been discussed, Senator Vance, or, sorry, Vice President Vance, when he was a senator, called for this, but it really hasn't moved anywhere. And the consensus coming out of the hear was maybe this isn't such a bad idea, maybe this is something that we should entertain. So you know, it was kind of funny. All the witnesses, including the witness that came from the American Bankers association, was kind of like, yeah, this is a good thing. I could just hear the big bank lobbyists just going, no, no, you need to fight this because this is money that we're gonna have to pay in. But this consensus was this wasn't a bad thing. So stay tuned. The one thing I had, the last thing I'd leave you with is Senator Tim Scott, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, did say, this is gonna be a very long process. This is not something that's gonna move quickly. So we have plenty of time to watch out for this. But if you're invested in the big banks and you're concerned about more money going to the dif, this is probably something you should pay attention to. So with that, I'm going to stop there. Say thank you very much for attending. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions this week and we always appreciate you listening. Thank you.