Courtesy of Pam Martens
House Financial Services Committee Hearing, May 16, 2019. Left to Right: Rodney Hood, Chair of the National Credit Union Administration; Jelena McWilliams, Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Joseph Otting, Head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Randal Quarles, Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
At a House Financial Services Committee hearing yesterday, Republicans attempted to marshal arguments for why U.S. banks needed more relief from regulatory oversight. Those arguments weren’t helped by the news of the day. As the hearing got underway, headlines were being promulgated around the globe that JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and three foreign banks had been fined $1.2 billion by the European Commission for rigging foreign exchange markets. The U.S. Department of Justice leveled criminal felony charges on the same two U.S. banks in 2015 for rigging the same market. Both banks admitted to the charges at that time.
A decade after the greatest financial crash in the United States since the Great Depression; after the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation has failed miserably in stopping the ongoing crime spree by Wall Street’s largest banks; and as radical right-wing members of Congress together with the President continue to chip away at the few safeguards that still exist for the public against these predatory behemoths, the new Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters, had the courage to convene yesterday’s hearing to put the spotlight on the people who regulate the Wall Street banks. (Missing from the lineup for unknown reasons was the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.)
The witness panel included Jelena McWilliams, Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – a Federal agency that would not have anywhere near enough money to bail out even one of the Wall Street mega banks if it got into trouble; Joseph Otting, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), whose career number-crunchers have quietly been producing data showing that JPMorgan Chase’s Federally-insured bank has a $2.2 trillion position in stock derivatives and that Goldman Sachs Bank USA, also a taxpayer backstopped bank, has a stunning 354 percent total credit exposure to capital as a result of its massive derivatives holdings. Then there was Randal Quarles, Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve – the body that kept Congress in the dark during the financial crisis as it secretly funneled $29 trillion to bail out teetering Wall Street banks and hedge funds and insolvent institutions like Citigroup – even though it is not legally allowed to make loans to an insolvent institution.
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