Courtesy of Pam Martens.
There is one key thing you need to know from the get-go about bank examiner Carmen Segarra’s Federal whistleblower lawsuit over being fired for her finding that Goldman Sach’s had no firm wide conflict of interests policy and landing in a Federal courtroom with even worse conflicts: this kind of McJustice has been tolerated in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York for at least the past 20 years.
Segarra was a bank examiner with a law degree at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street’s key regulators, who charged in a Federal lawsuit filed in October 2013 that she was told to change her negative examination of Goldman Sachs by colleagues, who also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. When she refused to alter her findings, she was terminated in retaliation and escorted from the Fed premises according to her lawsuit. The folks telling her to change her opinion at the New York Fed are called “relationship managers.”
It’s easy to see why the New York Fed, a study in conflicts, doesn’t consider conflicts a biggie at Goldman Sachs. The New York Fed is just one of 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks – but it is strangely unique among its peers. Here’s just a sampling of its uniqueness and outrageous conflicts:
The President of the New York Fed sits permanently on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The Presidents of the other 11 regional banks rotate on the FOMC;
Although there is no law requiring that the New York Fed should be the sole regional Federal Reserve Bank to conduct the open market operations of the FOMC, it has uniquely served in this function since 1935;
It is the only regional Federal Reserve Bank to have its own trading floor and speed dials to the largest firms on Wall Street;
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