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Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing (VIDEO) 14FEB13

SEN ELIZABETH WARREN D MA fired another warning shot over the bow of the government financial industry regulators and I'll bet some of them almost shit their pants. She is giving fair warning that as long as she is serving on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee they are going to be held accountable for their actions and inaction in addressing the criminal actions of the U.S. bank-financial cabal. Watch the video, she is fair and firm without resorting to demeaning the members of the panel. From HuffPost, followed by a video on Bill Moyers interviewing Neil Barofsky on the need for banking reform. 

http://youtu.be/liaUFcjPTxo

WASHINGTON -- Bank regulators got a sense Thursday of how their lives will be slightly different now that Elizabeth Warren sits on a Senate committee overseeing their agencies.

At her first Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing, Warren questioned top regulators from the alphabet soup that is the nation's financial regulatory structure: the FDIC, SEC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, Fed and Treasury.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed.

"We do not have to bring people to trial," Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of "consent orders," or settlements.

"I appreciate that you say you don't have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?" she responded.

"We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals," Curry offered.

Warren turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said that the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.

"I appreciate that. That's what everybody does," said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. "Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?"

"I will have to get back to you with specific information," Walter said as the audience tittered.

"There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial,'" Warren said.

A Warren constituent, open-Internet activist Aaron Swartz, recently committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors who reportedly said they wanted to "make an example" of him. Warren had met and said she admired Swartz and, after he died, expressed her concern by attending his memorial in Washington.

The financial regulators can blame, at least in part, Wall Street lobbyists (along with outgoing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Senate Republicans) for their embarrassing turn at the hearing. Warren would have been on the panel herself representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, instead of a sitting senator, if her nomination to head the agency hadn't been thwarted in 2011.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/elizabeth-warren-bank-regulators_n_2688998.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

Published on Oct 26, 2012

Between President Obama's ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney's loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout's Troubled Asset and Relief Plan, joins Bill to discuss the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown.

Currently a senior fellow and adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law, Barofsky is the author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

http://youtu.be/NjNCOM7Hztk