By Natalie DeCoste

Reports are swirling that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to appoint a top supervisor from the Federal Reserve to become the next acting comptroller of the currency.

Yellen is expected to appoint Michael Hsu, associate director of the Fed’s bank supervision and regulation division, as first deputy comptroller.

Hsu’s current position has him overseeing the largest financial institutions, including firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co. He has also played a key role in the response to the implosion of Archegos Capital Management.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is responsible for overseeing the country’s national banks and federal savings associations. The bureau supervises nearly 1,200 national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks that conduct approximately 70% of all banking business in the United States. Currently, Blake Paulson is the acting comptroller and has been since early January.

Once Yellen makes her announcement, which she is expected to make in the coming weeks, Paulson will remain at the agency as a deputy comptroller and chief operating officer.

After joining the OCC, Hsu will be assigned the title of first deputy comptroller. This will effectively put him in charge of the national bank regulator until a formal nominee for comptroller of the currency can be confirmed by the Senate. The formal process routinely takes months, and the Biden administration has not yet announced a nominee to lead the OCC.

It has been reported that one person, former Fed governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, has already turned down an offer to run the agency. In January Michael Barr, an Obama and Clinton administration alumnus who currently leads the University of Michigan’s public policy school, was the front runner for the comptroller position.

More progressive members of the Democratic party are pushing for the administration to give the job to Mehrsa Baradaran, an Iranian-born law professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”