Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Trump Announces at 2:30 P.M. on March 13, 2019 that the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 Are Being Grounded in U.S. (45 Other Countries Had Already Grounded the Plane.)
A crony Federal regulator, or one perceived to be captured by the industry it polices, will eventually doom consumer confidence in the products and services of the industry to which it provides oversight.
President Obama appointed Mary Jo White to serve as his Securities and Exchange Commission Chair for the final term of his presidency. White and her husband both worked for large law firms that together had represented every major Wall Street bank – the same ones that had created the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression in 2008. White’s supervision of Wall Street was so derelict that Senator Elizabeth Warren sent her a scathing 13-page critique of her performance.
Warren called out the SEC’s practice of settling the vast majority of cases without requiring meaningful admissions of guilt and White’s repeated recusals from investigations because of her prior employment (and her husband’s current employment) at law firms representing Wall Street. The New York Times reported in 2015 that the conflicts of White and her husband had resulted in her recusing herself “from more than four dozen enforcement investigations.” Although White had represented to Congress in a written letter that she would be retiring from her law firm upon confirmation as SEC Chair, she went back to that law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and now leads its Strategic Crisis Response and Solutions Group.
After its grossly negligent oversight of Wall Street going into the epic financial crash of 2008, Congress gave the Federal Reserve an increased supervisory role in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. But during the entire two terms of Obama’s presidency, he never appointed a Vice President for Supervision of the banks at the Fed as he was required to do under the law. Instead, he allowed the Fed to outsource supervision to the crony folks at the New York Fed. The President of the New York Fed at the time of the crash, Tim Geithner, was elevated by Obama to be his Treasury Secretary and to sit at the head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a new body created under the Dodd-Frank legislation to, ostensibly, provide a further layer of oversight to the big banks.
Trump has carried on Obama’s tradition, putting Jay Clayton in as head of the SEC. As we previously reported, Clayton had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street firms in the three years prior to his nomination.
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