Courtesy of Larry Doyle.
A slew of minutes and commentary related to Federal Reserve meetings held during the crisis of 2008 are just now being released.
While many of the minutes provide a riveting look at the topics on the table at that point in time, I found the following highlighted in a synopsis at The Street.com to be particularly meaningful.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher expressed concern that the Washington Mutual and Wachovia deals would serve to heighten systemic risk by increasing the concentration of banking assets and deposits to the largest U.S. banks.
While noting that the emergency meeting was not the time for discussions on limiting the “too-big-to-fail” problem, Fisher said, “I’d just like at some point to have a conversation on that matter,” while adding that he was “not objecting” to the Citigroup/Wachovia deal.
Bernanke agreed with Fisher, saying that once the crisis passed, “it’s very important, as we look toward restructuring our financial regulatory system, to develop good resolution mechanisms and to think about the issues of concentration and too big to fail.”
These two paragraphs are so meaningful because I strongly believe that we have never had the requisite conversations to properly address the restructuring of our financial regulatory system and eliminate the too big to fail risk still facing the American public.
As I told one journalist this morning, the American public is treated like a pile of mushrooms by those in Washington and in our media who gorge themselves on the do-re-mi provided by an array of cronies. Meanwhile, the public is fed a healthy serving of dung and largely kept in the dark.
