Karen Petrou: Why the Fed is a Repeat Offender
As we noted in a recent report, a divided Congress that may not even be able to keep the U.S. Government in business is one unlikely to enact substantive financial reform. Thus, we’re in for yet another episode of political damage control, regulatory excuses, and a few heads on enforcement spikes without meaningful, measurable, and accountable supervisory reform. Been there, done that, had another financial crash, or so my dispiriting read of recent efforts to force post-crash supervisory reform makes all too clear. It’s probably too much to ask that Congress not flit off to the next election before it ensures meaningful regulatory-agency accountability for manifold supervisory lapses, but if it does what it usually does, then we are doomed to more crashes with worse consequences unless it and the White House force the Fed to do what it’s never done before: meaningfully and transparently improve supervisory rigor and enforcement might.
In my memo three weeks ago, I showed how regulators by 2001 had failed to act on the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s before the largest bank failure at the time presaged the great financial crisis hot on its heels. After the GFC, the U.S. convened the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). When it issued its report in 2011, it drew scathing conclusions not only about all the “light-touch” regulation before the crash, but also supervisory unwillingness or inability to ensure that what rules there were were rules that were obeyed.
Despite this report and …