warren bank hearing | Warren questioned top regulators from the
alphabet soup that is the nation's financial regulatory structure: the
FDIC, SEC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, Fed and Treasury. Elizabeth Warren is the
truth!!!! show your support http://www.warren.senate.gov/
The
Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question
for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?
It was a harder question than it seemed.
"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.
Warner
turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, who said that 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.
"There
are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day
squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking
them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I'm really
concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial,'" Warren
said.
A Warren constituent, open-Internet activist Aaron Swartz,
recently committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors
who reportedly said they wanted to "make an example" of him. Warren had
met and said she admired Swartz and, after he died, expressed her
concern by attending his memorial in Washington.
The financial
regulators can blame, at least in part, Wall Street lobbyists (along
with outgoing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Senate Republicans)
for their embarrassing turn at the hearing. Warren would have been on
the panel herself representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
instead of a sitting senator, if her nomination to head the agency
hadn't been thwarted in 2011.