Senator Warren Puts Bank Regulators on Hot Seat
by Linda Beale
Senator Warren Puts Bank Regulators on Hot Seat
Elizabeth Warren started out her questioning of big bank regulators by noting that actual trials, where guilty parties are paraded before juries, information about their wrongdoing is spread over front pages, and everybody is aware that bad guys get punished for their bad deeds has an effect on whether the wrongdoing is committed in the first place. In the case of the big Wall Street banks, however, she notes that they made out like bandits during the speculative orgy that caused the financial system crisis, and yet not a one has paid by being taken to trial in this expressive way.
“Tell me,” she says to a group of bank regulators called before her Senate committee, “about the last few times you’ve taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street to trial. Anybody?”
The FCC representative, Tom Curry, notes that ordinarily they are just trying to move things along and correct deficiencies. Warren interrupts and notes–“yes, and you set a price for that… that’s effectively a settlement. What I’m asking is … when did you last take a financial institution, a Wall Street Bank, to trial? ” Curry “We’ve had a fair number of consent orders. We don’t have to bring them to trial.” Warren “I understand that you say you don’t “have” to but my question is when is the last time that you did?” (No further responsive answer).
(Dan here…a clip of her at the committee meeting is below the fold)
The same kind of interchange–can you identify when you last took Wall Street Banks to trial –was similarly nonresponded to by Elisse Walter. Nobody else even offered to comment. Certainly nobody offered a single date for “last time a Wall Street bank was taken to trial.”
Warren closed with a comment that made clear that she thought that a very different standard was being applied to Wall Street than is applied to ordinary citizens that commit even minor infractions. She noted that there are District Attorneys every day squeezing ordinary citizens on rather small matters and taking them to trial explicitly to set an example, but “For Wall Street banks, ‘too big to fail‘ has become ‘too big to try [take to trial]’. That just seems wrong to me.”
You go, Elizabeth. Without using the words “class warfare”, she has made absolutely crystal clear the class warfare problem that exists in our country today, where Wall Street institutions and their chiefs and chief owners get all kinds of protections while the little guy is shaken down for peanuts. As a commenter on the site already noted, if only there were 99 more like her in the Senate…..
cross posted with ataxingmatter
(Dan here…via Business Insider comes this clip about Senator Warren’s questioning at the hearing)
I wish she had the time to follow up with something like: So, in all your work there has not been one instance that in your opinion rose to the level of criminal activity such that in your opinion only jail time would do and thus take the case to trial?
Thank you, ELizabeth. Now how about revolving door prohibitions?
For a pretty good insight into how all this happens, I recommend Neil Barofsky’s book “Bailout.”
he was the inspector general in charge of preventing and prosecuting fraud arising from the bailout itself.
don’t want to spoil the ending, but you already know how it comes out.
everyone has an opinion and 99% of them are wrong. as a member of the 1% i offer my opinion that the O man is in this up to his neck. even if his head isn’t working, he hired Geithner, and was apparently “hired” by Rubin.
Linda
this is not class warfare. this is the crooks have captured out government.
not all of the rich are crooks. but as long as you talk about them as though they are, they will imagine that the crooks are on their side.
President Obama, two months after inauguration, telling America on the Leno show that Wall Street had committed no crimes. “The dirty little secret” is how the president put it.
Rubin, Summers, Geithner. Reach your own conclusions
Coberly:
This:
“Warren closed with a comment that made clear that she thought that a very different standard was being applied to Wall Street than is applied to ordinary citizens that commit even minor infractions. She noted that there are District Attorneys every day squeezing ordinary citizens on rather small matters and taking them to trial explicitly to set an example, but ‘For Wall Street banks, ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big to try [take to trial]’. That just seems wrong to me.'”
This is not about class warfare. It is about having equal and fair rights as guaranteed by the constitution. Today’s court system is heavily skewed towards the moneied interests. As an example; while we have one of the best constitutional attorneys in the nation, our chances of access to SCOTUS are slim to nothing. As I have repeatedly said in the past; “The days of Gideon writing a letter to SCOTUS and having his case reviewed are long gone.” You, I, and 99% of the citizens in the US have been categorically cut from the access lists to SCOTUS.
Laughable as it may seem, Roberts chastising Congress over budget is nonsensical; but, his words point to an important issue in the court system today . . . the inability of citizens to have access to a court system run on the cheap. 65 cases last year? What happened to the normal 85? And who is included in the 65? States who wish to argue their silly stance on the PPACA, Corporations who wish to argue United Ctizens, etc. Make no mistake, how the justice and court systems differentiate between money and every day citizens is a huge issue.
Something like 1000 executives were tried and convicted of various crimes, mainly fraud, in the Savings and Loan fiasco. In the current one we are up to, what, one indictment?
Politicians and their political outrage come and go.
Bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists just keep on running the country.
rusty
only as long as the politicians let them. the “political outrage” is just theater designed to impress the proles. but if you ever get an honest president or an honest congress… or even an honest Napoleon (he was, at first) you will see the house get cleaned… for awhile.
I love this woman and the way she frames her arguments. This type of questioning is so profound that it may go right over the head of most people. What she is saying is that a crime committed by a bank can be resolved between the bank and the authorities simply by paying a fee or settlement. In the third world we would call this a bribe. It is most definitely a bribe. Imagine this scenario in your life; a cop pulls you over for drunk driving and you ask him for a price, he says a grand, you fork it over and keep driving promising to behave. That essentially is what we have today.
Woolley, I like that scenario. I hope Sen Warren hears of it and uses it.
Daniel Becker
trouble with that scenario (analogy?) is that that is the way the law has applied to the rich for as long as i have ever heard about.
for a rich person to go to jail for drunk driving, he has to do it in front of a crowd of voters while naked.
I was also thinking that our regulators are basically engaging in a protection racket. They ask for money in return for avoiding prosecution. The money is handed over periodically, the regulators say thank you and then repeat the cycle. Tony Soprano would make a great regulator.
While it certainly is bribery, it flys under the flag of “campaign finance” (free speech, doncha know?) and the ever-revolving door between the regulated and the regulators.
And it may be true that it was forever thus, it seems to be going broader and deeper, or is it just because we no longer have true investigative journalism on that holds a nation-wide megaphone?
I worry that the partisanship has grown so bitter, with each side having their own audience, that even though I believe one side DOES have more evidence on their side, there’s no convincing the other side, because politics has become religion, and you can’t argue religion with a true believer.
Sandi
i think you are missing the point. the “sides” are both being duped by the “hot button politics.”
the fraud at the top now seems to own the government. “partisanship” just makes it easier for them to keep us from realizing who the real enemy is.
the congressmen are not so much “bribed” as they are paid performers.