Warm-Up Acts Over, Congress Readies for Rowdy Performance

We’ll be busy this week giving you in-depth analyses of all of the key hearings scheduled this week and next on what went wrong on bank failures past, present, and hopefully not future.  Last week saw two opening numbers:  HFSC’s Financial Institutions Subcommittee heard from bank lawyers, an investment bank CEO, and a professor and its Oversight Subcommittee reviewed GAO’s in-depth take-down (see Client Report REFORM223) of what the Fed and FDIC did at SVB and Signature and, by inference, what they said about it.  As our analyses described, Republicans are firmly convinced that the banking agencies dropped very big, obvious balls; Democrats aren’t exactly stout defenders, but they are doing their best to chime in with the agencies by emphasizing how badly bank management behaved and how much of their compensation needs to be recouped as reparations.

Al051523.pdf