Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Congressman Jeb Hensarling, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee
Jeb Hensarling, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has his nose to the ground, hot on the scent of crooks and liars in the finance industry. But are they the important crooks and liars? The ones that crash economies?
Like a dogged blood hound, Hensarling is determined to root out a Fed leak that occurred three years ago. This Thursday, he’s planning to beat up some more on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the young, underfunded agency that’s trying its best to protect average Americans against Wall Street’s crime wave.
The concern is that Hensarling, a Republican from Texas who calls himself “a life-long conservative,” has a broken antenna. While Hensarling is hunting down a Fed leak that is already under a Justice Department investigation, here’s what else is going on in the financial world.
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research has been reporting that the country’s biggest and riskiest banks are ginning up their capital with dubious capital relief trades while systemic contagion risk grows. Last month, two of the biggest U.S. banks and three foreign global banks operating in the U.S. pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiring to rig markets. More criminal investigations of market rigging are underway. Last week, a former UBS trader told a London court that this global bank, operating throughout the United States, had an actual “Manual” on how to rig the Libor interest rate benchmark to help the bank’s positions. He introduced the Manual into evidence. We also learned last month that there’s a prevailing motto in financial services: “If you aint cheating, you aint trying,” a trader’s chat room slogan revealed in the recent foreign exchange felony charges brought by the Justice Department.
The hearings that Hensarling has scheduled this year have a persistent theme: paint bank regulation as stifling economic growth; suggest private enterprise can do everything better than government; invoke “regulatory burden” in as many places as possible; and chase after foreign “terrorists” in financial markets when the real threat is the home-grown culture of America’s biggest banks that crashed the economy in 2008 and remains the biggest, most dangerous threat going forward.
…
