Elizabeth Warren said Wednesday morning that newly released tapes of regulators’ conversations with Goldman Sachs show that the “Fed is more concerned about its relationship with a too-big-to-fail bank than it is with protecting the American public.”
The first-term Democratic senator from Massachusetts called for oversight hearings of regulators based on the tapes soon after they were released last week. On Tuesday, House Democrats, including Financial Services Committee ranking member Maxine Waters of California, also called for hearings in the lower chamber.
Last week, ProPublica and NPR published stories about Carmen Segarra, a former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stationed inside Goldman Sachs. Concerned that the bank’s examiners were too acquiescent, Segarra secretly recorded conversations between Fed inspectors and Goldman Sachs bankers in 2012.
In an interview with NPR Wednesday, Warren said the recordings reveal “exactly what we already knew — that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that’s really needed.”
Warren, a former Harvard law professor, earned a reputation as a liberal critic of Wall Street as the head of the oversight panel for the 2008 TARP bailout of banks and later for setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In her interview Wednesday, Warren criticized the New York Fed for failing to report the “damning” things they heard from bankers and for hesitating to raise concerns about transactions with Goldman Sachs, let alone take legal steps to stop deals.
“You know, the cultural problem isn’t just some secondary concern. It’s the whole ballgame,” Warren said. “We can keep making the rules tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there.”
The episodes recounted in Segarra’s tapes took place long after the 2008 crisis and the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which was intended to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail and receiving taxpayer bailouts in the future.
Warren said the tapes showed some of the same problems that created the crisis: “What we’re seeing here is that same kind of cozy relationship, as the big financial institutions continue to run their operations, taking on more risk, doing what they want to do and brushing their regulators aside.”
Both the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs have denied wrongdoing.
