Segarra? Conflict of Interest? Follow the Money? End the Fed?

[WhiskeyGirl]

The fox and wolves guarding the hen house?

'Culture Clash' really?  Why do taxpayers keep getting stuck with the financial failures of big banks?  Big companies?  Big unions?  Big pension plans?  Failed immigrants?

Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash

Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.

 
 
The Federal Reserve, and, by dint of its location off Wall Street, the New York Fed, was the logical choice to head the effort. Except it had failed miserably in catching the meltdown.

New York Fed President William Dudley had to answer two questions quickly: Why had his institution blown it, and how could it do better? So he called in an outsider, a Columbia University finance professor named David Beim, and granted him unlimited access to investigate. In exchange, the results would remain secret.

After interviews with dozens of New York Fed employees, Beim learned something that surprised even him. The most daunting obstacle the New York Fed faced in overseeing the nation's biggest financial institutions was its own culture. The New York Fed had become too risk-averse and deferential to the banks it supervised. Its examiners feared contradicting bosses, who too often forced their findings into an institutional consensus that watered down much of what they did.

It seems like so many rotate between Wall Street, private banks, and government...when does the financial cord between the Fed and taxpayers end?  How is it ever fair that everyday people on Wall Street keep getting stuck paying off the bankruptcies, failures, and gambling debt of Wall Street and Big Banks? 

read more here - http://www.propublica.org/article/carmen-segarras-secret-recordings-from-inside-new-york-fed

There are many scary parts of article.  This is one of my favorites -

In a tense, 40-minute meeting recorded the week before she was fired, Segarra's boss repeatedly tries to persuade her to change her conclusion that Goldman was missing a policy to handle conflicts of interest. Segarra offered to review her evidence with higher-ups and told her boss she would accept being overruled once her findings were submitted. It wasn't enough.

"Why do you have to say there's no policy?" her boss said near the end of the grueling session.

"Professionally," Segarra responded, "I cannot agree."

Can you show me this policy?  Give me a copy?  Send it to my IPhone?

Why doesn't Wall Street and the big banks gamble away their own money?

Why isn't the Federal Reserve given a real audit and see some day light?

Anyone on Main Street getting a bailout?  I wonder how often the IRS audits the Fed and their policies?  Profits?

What is wrong with this picture?  A job rotation between Wall Street, The Fed, Treasury, and other government agencies?

[WhiskeyGirl]

NY Fed Fired Examiner Who Took on Goldman

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.

Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”

Today, Segarra filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the New York Fed in federal court in Manhattan seeking reinstatement and damages. The case provides a detailed look at a key aspect of the post-2008 financial reforms: The work of Fed bank examiners sent to scrutinize the nation’s “Too Big to Fail” institutions.

read more here - http://www.propublica.org/article/ny-fed-fired-examiner-who-took-on-goldman

More "We didn't know how this happened" or "We didn't see the big failure coming"...

Any serious reporting or analysis in action?  Learn anything for all the bank and savings and loans failures?  I don't think so.

Any serious change?

Why isn't the financial $$$ taxpayer funded bankroll for failure and gambling being ended?

It's like one big looting party going on for decades - S&L failure decades ago, big bank and insurance company failure in 2008, next big failure?

End the taxpayer $$$ 'lifeline'.  End the looting of Main Street.  Let the bankers use their own money for gambling, big salaries, and golden parachutes.

End the Federal Reserve.

just my humble opinions

[WhiskeyGirl]

Update: Congressional Reaction, Goldman Changes Conflicts Policy

Here are developments following our report about the New York Fed and Carmen Segarra’s secret recordings:

•Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, called for Senate hearings to explore whether the New York Fed is too deferential to banks it supervises, according to reports in The Hill and Reuters.

read more here - http://www.propublica.org/article/update-congressional-reaction-goldman-changes-conflicts-policy

What good does it do to explore whether the New York Fed is too deferential to banks? 

What good did Dodd Franke do for taxpayers?

End the Federal Reserve System sounds like a better idea.  How do you keep tabs on a large private bank when there is all the secrecy, job rotations, 'embedding' of Fed employees in 'too big to fail' banks?

How likely are the embedded to suggest REAL corrective actions against their lunch buddies?  The bank employee friends they make?

Can the system really be reformed by insiders?  Those on the taxpayer funded money fueled job rotation?

just my humble opinions

[WhiskeyGirl]

Whistleblower’s tapes suggest the Fed was protecting Goldman Sachs from the inside

One of the most troubling aspects of the financial crisis was that government regulators let it happen in the first place. And the most compelling explanation is also the most disturbing: regulators were unduly influenced or even controlled ("captured" is the term of art) by the very banks and financial firms they were meant to rein in. This argument, popularized most notably by MIT economist Simon Johnson, has strong circumstantial evidence supporting it, but concrete proof from within regulatory agencies has, understandably, been hard to come by.

On Friday, This American Life and ProPublica announced they had found such proof. A joint report produced by ProPublica reporter Jake Bernstein (who previously won a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting on Wall Street for the two outlets) revealed the existence of 46 hours of audio recordings made inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, as the Fed's interface with the financial sector, serves as one of country's most powerful bank regulators. Taken by former Fed bank examiner Carmen Segarra, the recordings suggest a culture within the Fed that was at best overly cautious in confronting bank wrongdoing, and at worst in bed with the banks it was regulating.

The TAL episode is worth listening to in full, and the ProPublica report is worth reading in full, but here are the very basics of what they found in case you're in a rush.

read more here - http://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6849287/federal-reserve-fed-goldman-sachs-this-american-life-carmen-segarra

How many Segarra's were fired before 2008?  The collapse of 'our' financial system?  The failure of Freddie and Fannie 'Freddie and Fannie are sound, you just don't like poor people'...

[WhiskeyGirl]

536: The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra

Read and hear more here - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra

[WhiskeyGirl]

After decades of government and bank/S&F failure to identify collapses, why keep the taxpayer money tapper on?

Why not cut the cord between taxpayer $$$ and the gambling and the never ending failure of big banks, Wall Street, and career job rotation failures?

Why is the burden of failure always on the backs of Main Street?  Working families? 

Why don't the banks fund their own failure?  Wheeling and dealing?  Gambling habits?  Use their own money?

What is wrong with the system?

Why not claw back the money?

Why does the system seemed to be rigged against taxpayers?

No one at the big banks goes to jail?  Looses their fortunes?  Happy life?  Home?  Retirement?