Courtesy of Pam Martens
Wall Street Bank CEOs Are Grilled at House Hearing, February 11, 2009
By Pam Martens
The new chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters of California, has held elected office for more than four decades. She has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1991. Prior to that, she served 14 years in the California State Assembly. She has been on the House Financial Services Committee for the past 28 years – a period in which she has witnessed the largest Wall Street banks dramatically expand their financial frauds against the public.
But can even a knowledgeable, seasoned veteran like Waters tackle the herculean problem that Wall Street banks represent to the country today?
Apparently, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon aren’t wasting any time trying to get a handle on the topics on which Waters intends to hold hearings. According to a report by CNBC in late January, both CEOs met separately with Waters after she became Committee Chair. The Wall Street Journal has further reported that Waters plans to call the CEOs of the six largest Wall Street banks to testify at a hearing in March or April. That would likely include: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.
The 2019 hearing would be the first time since February 11, 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, that all of the major Wall Street bank CEOs were grilled by this Committee. On that date, the topic was how the banks had used the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. Waters had this to say at the time:
Waters: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. This is an important hearing today. The question has been asked over and over again, what did the banks do with the taxpayer’s money? The taxpayers of America are very, very upset about the fact that they allowed the banks to borrow their money, the taxpayer’s money, in unprecedented amounts, billions of dollars. And when the taxpayers went back to the banks to say, may I have a loan, may I have a loan to buy a car, may I have a loan to pay my student fees, may I have a loan for a mortgage, the banks are saying, no. And to add insult to injury, the banks have sent out notices to credit card holders, taxpayers again who have loaned money to the big banks, the banks are saying to the credit card holders, oh, we’re going to increase your interest rates. We know that you were paying 13, 14, 15 percent already, but now it’s going to cost you 18, 19, 20 percent. So the taxpayers have lent their money to the big banks, who are supposed to be big-business persons, expertise in business management, who are failing, they’ve gone back to ask for some assistance, they’re being denied…”
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