Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Adam Posen Testifying Before the Senate Banking Committee, July 8, 2015
Last week we wrote about the invisible hand’s removal of a negative paragraph on the financial industry from the Pope’s speech before a joint session of Congress and some bizarre shenanigans with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s highly anticipated speech in Amherst, Massachusetts. This past Saturday, Adam Posen, the President of a powerful think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, delivered a speech at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, calling the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) “a mess.” That speech has gone missing from online access.
FSOC is the body created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to reassure the American people that Wall Street would never again be able to take the U.S. economy, the financial system, and the housing market to the cleaners and then get a multi-trillion dollar bailout. FSOC is chaired by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew (an alumnus of the biggest bailout recipient, Citigroup), along with the heads of every other major U.S. financial regulator.
According to Bloomberg Business, in his conference remarks on Saturday, Posen also said that what individual financial institutions are able to do with discretion from regulators was “huge.” (That two of the mega banks in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, admitted to criminal felony counts in May for rigging foreign currency markets along with other banks and that serial findings of collusion among the mega banks in multiple markets has now achieved epic dimensions, Posen’s comments would hardly seem an overstatement.)
The New York Times added more gravity to Posen’s remarks with this quote from him at the Saturday conference: “The current U.S. institutional setup is likely to fail in a crisis and will do less to prevent a crisis than it should, and we are likely to suffer from this.”
There are two places one would expect to find such a remarkably candid speech. At the official conference site where other speeches are posted or at Dr. Posen’s official page of speeches and publications at the Peterson Institute. We could not find the speech at either site, nor could we find it elsewhere on the Internet.
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