I love it when a former Congresscritter speaks the truth out loud.

New Yorker: It seems to me that we don’t necessarily want to count on the banks or the regulators always being perfect, so having these requirements might be useful.

Frank: I agree, but there’s no way to. You can require greater liquidity, etc. But there’s no way to force people to do their job well. By the way, are you assuming that, under Donald Trump, the regulation of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase was everything it should be because they were still covered by the law?

Oh, but there is when someone is in a position of public trust.

You hang them when they play with themselves instead of doing their job.

Who remembers IndyMac?  Uninsured depositors (and there were quite a few) got hosed on that one, and the reason they got hosed is that the bank was backdating deposits to avoid violating reserve requirements.  The problem is that the regulators knew it and deliberately ignored it; in point of fact the examiner who knew it specifically had done the same thing during the S&L crisis and not only didn't go to jail, he still had his job.

And by the way, for those who think Sheila Bair would be a good choice to bring back would you like me to repost some of my articles from the 08-09 timeframe aimed at her, specifically, and her failure at the FDIC to enforce a law called "Prompt Corrective Action" which requires the FDIC to act before a bank invades its bond portfolio and thus is insolvent?

Said law is not a suggestion -- it is a law.  Yet exactly nobody has been indicted for their failure to do their actual job and enforce the law.

Its been fifteen years since that crap blew up the banking (and asset market) world generally and the people who stole the money not only got to keep it they got to ruin you -- and not a single thing changed.  These jackasses are still running around screaming about how "wonderful" they all are and, of course, how diverse!

It is absolutely true that OCC is responsible for examining the financial condition of banks.  It was back in 2007 too, along with OTS for thrifts (one of the changes is that OTS and OCC were folded into OCC.)  These requirements are not suggestions -- they are laws.  Yet we see the same thing happen all over the country, including gang-bangers being let out of jail because racism made the dude pull a gun as he was a poor blaaaaaaack or bwowwwwwwn boy, laws against carjacking and similar thuggery be damned.

We allow little hooligans to remain in schools because its too much to expect them to actually sit in class and not attack their teachers and, since we won't take those little thugs and put them somewhere else (like a reform school or even a rubber room) we then wonder why we have teachers who can't and unions who we allow to stay in power even when their members are drawing a salary while failing to do their job.  Of course the most important factor in all of this is whether a boy who claims he was born into the wrong body can go into the girl's locker room and leer at the actual girl's breasts.

We have a Treasury Secretary who ignores any law she finds inconvenient just as she did when she was at The Fed; why its important to talk about how climate is going to ruin financial conditions if we don't kill whales with windmills which disrupt their navigational capacity but its perfectly ok that our banking system enables the expenditure of gigawatts of power, all of which must be dumped as heat into the environment, for the trading of mathematical formulas with no intrinsic value of any sort (so-called "crypto" assets) when that same heat could do something productive -- like, for example, turn coal into synfuel or build a LFTR that can then do so, remove the alpha emitters from said coal and use them for power instead of causing lung cancer, and make the lights and heat in your home work.

This very same Treasury Secretary is well-aware that fully one third of the funds spent by said Treasury Department goes to Medicare and Medicaid and that is 80% unfunded, which is in fact more than the entire federal deficit.  Said person also knows that 15 USC Chapter 1 forbids any sort of scheme to fix prices or monopolize trade including internationally and that every drug company in the land does exactly that with their differential pricing between nations, say much less between individuals in the United States which virtually every medical provider in the US violates on a daily basis.  She also knows that this practice was challenged twice all the way to the Supreme Court and found to be illegal.  As the person signing the checks she thus also knows she's suborning, permitting and furthering felony violations of laws that have stood on the books for more than 100 years and yet rather than demand the DOJ put a stop to it and refuse to issue said checks until it is stopped she gives a speech about how women and minorities are under-represented and, once again, your Suburban is ruining the environment.

In 2006 it was blatantly obvious that the Option ARMs and other similar hinky products were fraud-riven packs of lies and everyone knew it.  There were tapes and emails of bankers having conversations with each other calling those securities vomit yet three minutes later they were off selling them to customers as "good investments"!  Not a single one of those institutions or persons went to jail and neither did any of the regulators who were quite-clearly doing anything other than regulating -- perhaps they were watching porn on the Internet in their offices?

That "zero" interest rates would not persist into the indefinite future because it could not, that M2 was driven up on a parabolic trajectory by both Democrat and Republican administrations with exactly neither Treasury Secretary doing a thing to stop it, that Trump bragged repeatedly about being "The King of Debt", that every penny of The Fed's bond-buying could only happen if the Treasury continued to deficit spend and thus issue said bonds was in fact driven by and caused by that issuance and that all of this was wild-eyed crazy, irrational and criminally negligent, akin to giving a convicted arsonist a five gallon can of gasoline, a pack of matches and several bricks to throw through the windows of buildings is fact.

That we, the people of this nation were given a prime, front-row seat as to what happens when you allow such conduct and refuse to jail those who are supposed to enforce laws but refuse, and instead they collude with entities interested in stealing everything they can is also fact.  That happened fifteen years ago, I reported on every bit of it and you would think the damage it inflicted on the average American would have forced reform -- if not jail right then and there a very clear statement that if it happened again we, the people, will not wait around to see if you suddenly decide to enforce the law -- we will do so on a summary and final basis, so you better cut that crap out.

But nooooooo!

Instead we're still screaming "Diversity!", "Equity!" and "Inclusion!" without a single care in the world as to whether before any of those the two most-important words of all are enforced:  COMPETENCE and JUSTICE.