US Senator Elizabeth Warren Quizmaster?! Federal Regulators Flummoxed by Only One Interrogative
US Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren is the junior most senior member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. *When John Kerry gave up his seat as Massachusetts’ senior senator to become Secretary of State, newly elected Warren became the senior senator from Massachusetts; this is her first term in the Senate and in that regard she is junior.*
At her very first hearing sponsored by he Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the senator posed the following question to the regulators present to provide testimony about how they regulate banking companies in the US:
“When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? ”
None of the persons called to testify were able to provide an answer to the question.
“We do not have to bring people to trial,” Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of “consent orders,” or settlements.
“I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?” she responded.
“We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals,” Curry offered.
Warren turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.
“I appreciate that. That’s what everybody does,” said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. “Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?”
“I will have to get back to you with specific information,” Walter said as the audience tittered.
The witnesses, whose job it is to regulate the banksters, were caught off guard. As members of the viewing audience we , too, were surprised. Typically what happens at hearings of these types is an excessive amount of posturing and bloviating about matters that do not substantively concern the people allegedly being represented by those conducting the hearing, an investigation into “what had happened was…”
It’s refreshing to witness a congressional representative ask the questions you or I would ask. This question is one we’ve been asking since the beginning of the destruction of our current economy.
We say exercise those other legal regulatory arrows in your quiver, federal regulators. When was the last time a banking company lost its license to operate as a banking institution?
Revocation of the ability to operate anywhere in the US would be a start for the once Too Big To Fail Banks, now Too Big To Take To Trial and apparently Too Big To Penalize in the same measure as they have destroyed the lives of untold families, communities and even cities.
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