Senator pushes regulators on rules for private equity bank deals

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and chairman of a Senate subcommittee charged with overseeing Wall Street, wants the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other financial regulators to come up with rules for private equity firms that want to buy banks.

Reed's interest in the matter may give the FDIC an incentive to quickly fulfill a promise it made to provide "policy guidance" for such deals after seizing Florida-based BankUnited and selling it to a group of private equity funds last week in the biggest bank failure this year.