“Can you smell what Elizabeth Warren is cooking?”
I got a whiff of something that smelled wonderful this morning, if unfamiliar.
It took me awhile to place it.
It was the smell of accountability.
While many of us were busy yesterday foisting chocolates and romantic overtures on that special someone, Senator Elizabeth Warren was sending her own Valentine’s Day overtures to banking regulators in her debut Banking Committee hearing.
“What I’d like to know is tell me a little bit about the last few times you’ve taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial,” the Massachusetts lawmaker said to applause, speaking to the federal regulators gathered for a hearing on Wall Street reform.
No witnesses spoke up.
Warren raised her eyebrows. “Anybody?” she asked.
Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, spoke up: “We’ve actually had a fair number of consent orders. We do not have to bring people to a trial…”
“I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial,” Warren said. “My question is, when did you bring them to trial?”
“We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals,” Curry said.
Warren moved on to the rest of the panel, knowing full well that none of the regulators present have brought a Wall Street bank to trial.
“I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial,'” Warren later said.”
As are we all Senator. Getting these important guardians of the public interest to admit publicly and on the record that they have been coddling those whom they are tasked to regulate is something we really could use a bit more of.
Bravo, and please keep up the good work.
And here’s hoping so many of your peers stop hanging out on the sidelines on this very important issue.
ed note: Senator Warren’s background is in econ and consumer advocacy. She was a Harvard law professor.