About the OCC:
John D. Hawke, Jr.
Comptroller of the Currency 1998 - 2004
John D. Hawke, Jr.
was sworn in
as the 28th Comptroller of the Currency on December 8, 1998. After serving for 10
months under a Recess Appointment, he was sworn in for a full five-year
term as Comptroller on October 13, 1999. He left office on October 13, 2004.
The Comptroller of the Currency is the Administrator of National Banks. The
Office of the Comptroller (OCC) supervises about 2,200 federally chartered
commercial banks and about 52 federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in
the United States comprising more than half of the assets of the commercial
banking system. The Comptroller also serves as a Director of the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination
Council, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
Prior to his appointment as Comptroller, Mr. Hawke served for 3½ years as Under
Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. In that capacity he oversaw the
development of policy and legislation in the areas of financial institutions,
debt management, and capital markets, and served as Chairman of the Advanced
Counterfeit Deterrence Steering Committee and as a member of the board of the
Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Before joining Treasury, Mr. Hawke
was a Senior Partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Arnold & Porter,
which he first joined as an associate in 1962. At Arnold & Porter he headed the
Financial Institutions practice, and from 1987 to 1995 he served as Chairman of
the firm. In 1975 he left the firm to serve as General Counsel to the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System, returning in 1978.
Mr. Hawke was graduated from Yale University in 1954 with a B.A. in English.
From 1955 to 1957 he served on active duty with the U.S. Air Force. After
graduating in 1960 from Columbia University School of Law, where he was
Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review
, Mr. Hawke was a law clerk for Judge E. Barrett Prettyman on the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1961 to 1962 he served as
counsel to the Select Subcommittee on Education in the House of
Representatives.
From 1970 to 1987 Mr. Hawke taught courses on federal regulation of banking at
the Georgetown University Law Center. He has also taught courses on bank
acquisitions and financial regulation and serves as the Chairman of the Board
of Advisors of the Morin Center for Banking Law Studies at Boston University
School of Law.
In 1987 Mr. Hawke served as a member of a Committee of Inquiry appointed by the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange to study the role of futures markets in connection
with the stock market crash in October of that year.
Mr. Hawke has written extensively on matters relating to the regulation of
financial institutions, and is the author of Commentaries on Banking Regulation,
published in 1985. He was a founding member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory
Committee, and served on the committee until joining Treasury in April 1995.
Mr. Hawke is a member of the Cosmos Club, the Economic Club of Washington, and
the Exchequer Club of Washington.
Born in New York City on June 26, 1933, Mr. Hawke resides in Washington, D.C.
He was married in 1962 to the late Marie R. Hawke and has four adult children,
Daniel, Caitlin, Anne, and Patrick, and two grandchildren, Spencer Patrick
Hawke and Camerynn Marie Hawke.
Comptrollers of the Currency
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