“Our brief reflects our long-held position that no single life insurance company poses a systemic risk to our financial system,” said ACLI President and CEO Governor Dirk Kempthorne.

ACLI states in its brief that “MetLife convincingly demonstrates why its designation as a systematically important financial institution (“SIFI”) by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (The Council) was arbitrary and capricious; unsupported by the record, empirical fact, or economic logic; and contrary to law.”

ACLI offers two arguments in support of MetLife’s position.

ACLI says that “the Council failed to account for the basic differences between banks, on the one hand, and insurance companies, on the other, including differences in the products offered, the liabilities assumed, and the economic risks respectively faced by banks and insurers. Bedrock principles of reasoned decision-making under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) required both to identify and account for the differences between these two very different types of financial institutions.

 “Second, the Council’s designation of MetLife as a SIFI—thereby subjecting MetLife to more burdensome federal regulation—reflected the Council’s misunderstanding and unreasonable disregard of existing state regulation of the life insurance industry,” ACLI says. “Congress imposed a specific statutory duty on the Council to assess existing regulation of nonbank financial institutions before subjecting them to additional federal regulation. The Council violated that duty by failing to assess meaningfully the time-tested system of state regulation that has long governed the life insurance industry effectively.

“Each of those two grounds provides a more than sufficient basis for affirming the District Court’s rescission of MetLife’s SIFI designation.”