U.S. regulators on Thursday proposed easing bank capital rules, a move that would allow the country’s largest lenders to hold billions of dollars less in capital and mark a major win for the sector, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The Federal Reserve voted 6-1 to issue the proposals, which would revise post-2008 financial crisis safeguards and open a 60-day public comment period before any final adoption. The changes would let the biggest banks hold on average 2.4 percent less capital, or about $20 billion less than they do now, according to a Fed memo cited by the Journal. Including earlier Trump-era changes, such as revisions to stress tests, that reduction would rise to 4.8 percent, the report said.

Midsize banks would see average capital reductions of 5.2 percent when stress-test revisions are included, while smaller banks would see average reductions of 7.8 percent, according to the WSJ.

“An important benefit of these proposals is that they would reduce incentives for traditional lending activities—like mortgage origination, mortgage servicing, and lending to businesses—to migrate outside of the regulated banking sector,” Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said in the report.

The move reverses the Biden administration’s push for tougher Basel-related standards after the 2023 bank failures. Earlier versions of those proposals would have raised capital requirements for the largest banks by as much as 20 percent, later revised to percent.

Fed Governor Michael Barr, the former vice chair for supervision under President Joe Biden, cast the lone dissenting vote. “I fear that, if this much weaker version of Basel III is adopted in the U.S., it could trigger a race to the bottom on standards, harming the global financial system,” Barr said, according to the Journal.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal