Courtesy of Pam Martens
Saule Omarova
Yesterday, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane.
In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system:
(1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve;
(2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy;
(3) Allow the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a bubble trend,” such as with technology stocks today, to “short these securities, thereby putting downward pressure on their prices”;
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