Courtesy of Pam Martens.
President Obama Meets With Members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council on Monday, March 7, 2016
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2016
Last Friday, the Obama administration announced that the President would be meeting at the White House with key Wall Street regulators yesterday. In fact, the meeting yesterday included 9 of the 10 voting members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), the body created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to prevent another catastrophic collapse of the U.S. financial system. The President also brought along a key group of his economic advisers and, interestingly, Neil Eggleston, the White House Counsel. (See full attendee list below.)
F-SOC is chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, who likely functions as President Obama’s eyes and ears on the Council and for financial stability issues in general. Lew attended yesterday’s meeting and sat across from the President at the press conference that followed. (See video of full press conference below.) Lew may have some qualms about what’s he’s hearing in F-SOC meetings from the Office of Financial Research, another body created under Dodd-Frank. The Office of Financial Research has raised repeated warnings about the interconnected mega banks posing potential threats to stability. The last thing President Obama wants for his legacy is to take office in the midst of the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression and leave office in the midst of a new one.
Shoring up his legacy was clearly on the mind of the President, based on his comments during the press conference. (See full transcript here.) At one point the President suggested that the political bashing coming at him from the campaign trail was getting under his skin, stating:
“As we worked to recover from this crisis, we’ve also worked to prevent this crisis from happening again. And Wall Street reform — Dodd-Frank — the laws that we passed have worked. I want to emphasize this because it is popular in the media, in political discourse — both on the left and the right — to suggest that the crisis happened and nothing changed. That is not true.”
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