Bank Regulation Catfight!
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Mmm, what a tasty way to start a Tuesday morning — with reports of an obscenity-laden tussle between government money nerds over the very sexy topic of bank regulation! Here is what you need to know: Tim Geithner wants a single authority called the National Bank Supervisor providing oversight over our nation’s many banks, and Sheila Bair opposes this consolidation. On Friday, Geithner gathered Bair and Ben Bernanke and Mary Schapiro, the SEC Chairman, to quit running their yaps to newspapers about how much they hated all his ideas. MORE »











Your friendly neighborhood Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the nice people who insure consumers’ bank deposits — has been having a sort of a rough time lately, what with all the banks constantly going broke. The insurance fund was pretty heavily depleted over the past year, thanks to horrific failures like IndyMac which cost the FDIC more than $10 billion. And it’s not like we have seen the end of bank failures, nosir!
Oh dang! Rumor has it that Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary-to-be, does not care for our beloved Sheila Bair and her maverick ways. Bair is the chairman of the FDIC and one of the few high-profile Bush administration appointees to very repeatedly and publicly bang the drum about how if our financial crisis is ultimately due to people’s mortgages going south, maybe we ought to work on fixing those bad mortgages. She’s a working class hero! So naturally, Giethner hates her guts.