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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Congresswoman Maxine Waters Steps into the Ring as Referee in the Battle for Control of the FDIC

Courtesy of Pam Martens

Congresswoman Maxine Waters

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Chair of House Financial Services Committee

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Maxine Waters is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. That Committee oversees the nation’s banks, including the megabanks on Wall Street that are serially charged by prosecutors with ever creative ways of looting the public. Waters’ Committee also oversees the bank regulators, which are frequently “captured” by Wall Street. One of those bank regulators has now come into the cross hairs of Waters.

Typically, if one is a captured bank regulator, one goes to extreme lengths to hide that fact. Thus, it is unusual that the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Jelena McWilliams (a Trump holdover), has decided she has the power to run the federal agency with an iron hand and overturn the will of her Board of Directors. Even more unusual, McWilliams is engaging in this battle with her Board in public.

We’ve seen plenty of nasty corporate board battles over the years but this is the only time we can recall that the Chair of a federal banking regulator has taken the position that she, unilaterally, can override a decision voted favorably on by a majority of her Board of Directors.

The FDIC is the federal bank regulator that oversees federal deposit insurance and sends examiners into the banks that are federally insured in order to maintain their safety and soundness. The fact that three large, federally-insured banks in the U.S. (Citigroup, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual) blew themselves up during the 2008 financial crisis, suggests that exactly how the FDIC conducts its oversight of these institutions, and just how large and unmanageable it allows them to become, is a serious matter for Congressional oversight. (See OCC Says JPMorgan Chase Has $29.1 Trillion of Custody Assets; That’s $8 Trillion More than the Assets of All Banks in the U.S.)

Jelena McWilliams, Chair of the FDIC

Jelena McWilliams, Chair of the FDIC

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