Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Elizabeth Warren Questioning Fed Nominee Stanley Fischer on March 13, 2014
Stanley Fischer did not get a proper vetting at his Senate Banking confirmation hearing last Thursday to serve as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Of the 22-member Senate Banking Committee, only five Senators, outside of the Chair and Ranking Member, showed up to question Fischer. Questions should have focused on Fischer’s ties to Citigroup, the serially corrupt mega bank which collapsed into the arms of taxpayers in 2008, requiring a bailout of $45 billion in equity infusions, $300 billion in asset guarantees to stop a run on the bank, and over $2 trillion in below market rate loans from the Federal Reserve to prop it up.
Of the five regular Committee members questioning Fischer, all Democrats, only one, Senator Elizabeth Warren, brought up his ties to Citigroup and the bank’s insidious relationship with government and regulators. We’ll get to that in a moment. First, these are the issues on which the public has been denied adequate information and which the Senate Banking Committee has failed miserably to question.
In a December 20, 2001 employment agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of Citigroup by Sanford (Sandy) Weill, Chairman and CEO, and Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary turned Citigroup Board Member, a new Vice Chairman, Stanley Fischer, would join the bank on February 1, 2002 with a lavish compensation package for a man who had never worked in commercial banking.
In addition to medical and other executive perks, Fischer’s employment agreement promised:
$41,666 in monthly compensation;
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