Federal Reserve tells JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs to improve capital plans

In a blow to two major Wall Street banks, the Federal Reserve told Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase that they must fix flaws in how they determine capital payouts to shareholders, but still approved their plans for share buybacks and dividends.

The Fed said JPMorgan and Goldman would have to submit new plans by the end of the third quarter. A senior central bank official declined to identify specific problems.

In the second phase of the Fed's annual stress tests of the 18 largest US banks, the regulator said on Thursday that it had approved 14 firms' capital plans without any strings attached.

The Fed vetoed submissions by BB&T Corp and Ally Financial.

The results show the Fed is keeping a tight leash on the nation's big banks five years after the US financial crisis.

The annual testing has become a key tool for regulators to ensure that banks are not eating too much into their capital cushions, by examining how banks would weather a hypothetical major market shock.

Last week, in the first set of stress test results, the Fed said that without their planned capital distributions, major US banks overall had enough capital to withstand a severe economic downturn.

Ally Financial was the only bank last week that failed to meet the minimum hurdle of a 5 percent capital buffer in the Fed's test, which assumed a spike in unemployment to 12.1 percent and a 50 percent drop in share prices.

The Fed also uses the tests to determine whether banks are in a position to pay out dividends or buy back shares.

The tests have become a source of tension between banks and the Fed. Some banks last week released results of their own tests, calculated using the same scenarios the Fed used. Many banks scored themselves higher than the Fed did.

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