Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, May 16, 2023
Elizabeth Warren continues to demonstrate why she is the indispensable progressive leader in America. She exposes and explains daunting insider issues in ways that ordinary people can grasp. And there is nobody better at humiliating corporate malefactors and their chums in government. Warren is a faithful ally of the Biden administration, but Biden officials who take a dive for industry can expect no mercy.
This week, the issue was the perennial problem of bank concentration. The object of Warren’s skewering was acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu, a close ally of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a friend of the biggest banks, who never should have gotten the job. The issue was why Hsu violated his agency’s own guidelines in allowing JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, to acquire failed First Republic Bank, rather than two other plausible smaller suitors, PNC or Citizens Bank.
I recently pointed out in this post that the delivery of First Republic to JPMorgan Chase in a sweetheart deal was all but guaranteed because JPMorgan had done earlier favors for the Treasury in assembling a pool of $30 billion in deposits to try to save the failing bank. That favor was explicitly welcomed by Treasury Secretary Yellen.
At yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, Warren probed Hsu’s knowledge of his agency’s own metric for measuring the increased danger to the banking system from the risk that a very large bank will fail. As Warren reminded a flustered and poorly informed Hsu, the risk of JPMorgan failing is eight times more damaging to the banking system than the failure of PNC, and 14 times more dangerous than a failure of Citizens.
“How do you explain approving a sale to a banking giant that increases the risk to the banking system by somewhere between nearly 800 percent and 1,400 percent more than selling to other bidders,” Warren asked. “Did you just ignore the fact that a failure at JPMorgan would blow a hole in our banking system … and let them grow by $200 billion?”
Hsu replied in a welter of bureaucratic double-talk, that other metrics were more appropriate in his decision to allow JPMorgan to take over First Republic. His glossing over the impact on the system’s increased concentration is doubly problematic because Hsu is the lead regulator in fashioning new guidelines on bank mergers.
But Warren wasn’t finished. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that PNC and other big banks have floated the idea of paying money they owe to the FDIC in Treasury bonds that are currently worth less than their face value, due to the Fed’s serial interest rate hikes, but have the FDIC credit them at full value.
Seriously? Warren was incensed.
She wrote a letter to FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg, a far more public-minded regulator than acting Comptroller Hsu: “Approval of this proposal would be an outrageous breach of the FDIC’s responsibilities, and I urge you to reject it or any similar approach that would unjustly enrich big banks at taxpayer expense.”
As of this writing, Gruenberg has not replied, but a spokesperson for the FDIC said that the agency’s rules don’t allow banks to pay it in Treasury bonds.
If Elizabeth Warren were not currently serving in the Senate, we would need to look to the history books to be reminded of how the greatest of the crusading progressives functioned. Fortunately, we can look to Warren.
