“Ex-Alaba­ma Gov. Don Siegel­man Speaks Out on Karl Rove, Witch Hunt Hours Before Return­ing to Jail”

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/11/former_alabama_gov_don_siegelman_speaks

With Eric Hold­er’s replace­ment now the top­ic of spec­u­la­tion, here’s a fun fact that should clar­i­fy the chal­lenges fac­ing the next Attor­ney Gen­er­al: “once clients are wealthy enough cer­tain con­sumer laws don’t apply to them.” Yep. Oh wait, “you did­n’t hear that”:

Bloomberg View
The Secret Gold­man Sachs Tapes
Sept 26, 2014 6:03 AM EDT

By Michael Lewis

(Cor­rects num­ber of hours taped in fourth para­graph.)

Prob­a­bly most peo­ple would agree that the peo­ple paid by the U.S. gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late Wall Street have had their dif­fi­cul­ties. Most peo­ple would prob­a­bly also agree on two rea­sons those dif­fi­cul­ties seem only to be grow­ing: an ever-more com­plex finan­cial sys­tem that reg­u­la­tors must have explained to them by the financiers who cre­ate it, and the ever-more com­mon prac­tice among reg­u­la­tors of leav­ing their gov­ern­ment jobs for much high­er pay­ing jobs at the very banks they were once meant to reg­u­late. Wall Street’s reg­u­la­tors are peo­ple who are paid by Wall Street to accept Wall Street’s expla­na­tions of itself, and who have lit­tle abil­i­ty to defend them­selves from those expla­na­tions.

Our finan­cial reg­u­la­to­ry sys­tem is obvi­ous­ly dys­func­tion­al. But because the sub­ject is so tedious, and the details so com­pli­cat­ed, the pub­lic does­n’t pay it much atten­tion.

That may very well change today, for today — Fri­day, Sept. 26 — the radio pro­gram “This Amer­i­can Life” will air a jaw-drop­ping sto­ry about Wall Street reg­u­la­tion, and the pub­lic will have no trou­ble at all under­stand­ing it.

The reporter, Jake Bern­stein, has obtained 46 hours of tape record­ings, made secret­ly by a Fed­er­al Reserve employ­ee, of con­ver­sa­tions with­in the Fed, and between the Fed and Gold­man Sachs. The Ray Rice video for the finan­cial sec­tor has arrived.

First, a bit of back­ground — which you might get equal­ly well from today’s broad­cast. After the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, the New York Fed, now the chief U.S. bank reg­u­la­tor, com­mis­sioned a study of itself. This study, which the Fed also intend­ed to keep to itself, set out to under­stand why the Fed had­n’t spot­ted the insane and destruc­tive behav­ior inside the big banks, and stopped it before it got out of con­trol. The “dis­cus­sion draft” of the Fed’s inter­nal study, led by a Colum­bia Busi­ness School pro­fes­sor and for­mer banker named David Beim, was sent to the Fed on Aug. 18, 2009.

It’s an extra­or­di­nary doc­u­ment. There is not space here to do it jus­tice, but the gist is this: The Fed failed to reg­u­late the banks because it did not encour­age its employ­ees to ask ques­tions, to speak their minds or to point out prob­lems.

Just the oppo­site: The Fed encour­ages its employ­ees to keep their heads down, to obey their man­agers and to appease the banks. That is, bank reg­u­la­tors failed to do their jobs prop­er­ly not because they lacked the tools but because they were dis­cour­aged from using them.

The report quotes Fed employ­ees say­ing things like, “until I know what my boss thinks I don’t want to tell you,” and “no one feels indi­vid­u­al­ly account­able for finan­cial cri­sis mis­takes because man­age­ment is through con­sen­sus.” Beim was him­self sur­prised that what he thought was going to be an inves­ti­ga­tion of finan­cial fail­ure was actu­al­ly a sto­ry of cul­tur­al fail­ure.

Any Fed man­ag­er who read the Beim report, and who want­ed to fix his insti­tu­tion, or mere­ly cov­er his ass, would instant­ly have set out to hire strong-willed, inde­pen­dent-mind­ed peo­ple who were will­ing to speak their minds, and set them loose on our finan­cial sec­tor. The Fed does not appear to have done this, at least not inten­tion­al­ly. But in late 2011, as those man­agers staffed up to take on the greater bank reg­u­la­to­ry role giv­en to them by the Dodd-Frank leg­is­la­tion, they hired a bunch of new peo­ple and one of them was a strong-willed, inde­pen­dent-mind­ed woman named Car­men Segar­ra.

I’ve nev­er met Segar­ra, but she comes across on the broad­cast as a lik­able com­bi­na­tion of good-humored and prin­ci­pled. “This Amer­i­can Life” also inter­viewed peo­ple who had worked with her, before she arrived at the Fed, who describe her as smart and occa­sion­al­ly blunt, but nev­er unpro­fes­sion­al. She is obvi­ous­ly bright and inquis­i­tive: speaks four lan­guages, holds degrees from Har­vard, Cor­nell and Colum­bia. She is also obvi­ous­ly knowl­edge­able: Before going to work at the Fed, she worked direct­ly, and suc­cess­ful­ly, for the legal and com­pli­ance depart­ments of big banks. She went to work for the Fed after the finan­cial cri­sis, she says, only because she thought she had the abil­i­ty to help the Fed to fix the sys­tem.

In ear­ly 2012, Segar­ra was assigned to reg­u­late Gold­man Sachs, and so was installed inside Gold­man. (The peo­ple who reg­u­late banks for the Fed are phys­i­cal­ly sta­tioned inside the banks.)

The job right from the start seems to have been dif­fer­ent from what she had imag­ined: In meet­ings, Fed employ­ees would defer to the Gold­man peo­ple; if one of the Gold­man peo­ple said some­thing reveal­ing or even alarm­ing, the oth­er Fed employ­ees in the meet­ing would either ignore or down­play it. For instance, in one meet­ing a Gold­man employ­ee expressed the view that “once clients are wealthy enough cer­tain con­sumer laws don’t apply to them.” After that meet­ing, Segar­ra turned to a fel­low Fed reg­u­la­tor and said how sur­prised she was by that state­ment — to which the reg­u­la­tor replied, “You did­n’t hear that.”

...

Sheesh....next thing you know we’re going to be learn­ing that, not only are there peo­ple “wealthy enough” to make con­sumer laws no longer apply to them, but there’s also a group of peo­ple so wealthy that they get to decide how those laws and reg­u­la­tions are writ­ten in the first place. What a scary thought.