[Sen. Elizabeth Warren] is leading the charge to derail another Wall Street-friendly Obama nominee: investment banker Antonio Weiss. Last month, the president tapped Weiss to become the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance, a position with immense power over big banks. If confirmed, consumer advocates fear, Weiss may not go to bat for average Americans while helping craft banking rules and battling Republican-led efforts to gut financial reform.It seems to be some radical, out-there proposition that maybe the people who run monetary policy and the people who make great mountains of money on their ability to manipulate that policy should not be the same people. There's no one in America who has a good grasp of the issues involved but does not work in the Wall Street banks we regulate? Really? Even setting aside the relative merits of any one individual, it seems like you would want a more diverse farm team than that. And when we're not setting aside the relative merits of any one individual, we get, every last sodding time, this:
The administration source says that Weiss' resumé does not mean that he would work to weaken rules on the financial industry. The source adds that if Weiss is confirmed, he would no longer have ties to his former employer; ethics rules require that he divest his holdings or put his investments in a blind trust.Bully for us for putting rules in place saying the people at Treasury can't keep their side jobs making money off the things they themselves are simultaneously regulating, but that's only really part of the point. The other bit is that all these people taking administration-nominated jobs governing the titans of Wall Street who themselves are big wheels in those firms know that being a Treasury official is a short-term job, after which they will go back to their previous careers, providing they have not done anything that might damage those needed relationships. It's a bit hard to, say, shut down one of the most profitable products or divisions of a major financial institution on the grounds of that product or division being fundamentally crooked, then go back to the same company a few years later with resume in hand. Nobody likes to have those conversations, and so the individuals that have taken those revolving doors have tended to not shut down crooked products or divisions at all.
It would be much like staffing the Environmental Protection Agency principally with prominent oil tycoons because they know the ins and outs of polluting things. Whether they are graciously willing to put their oil money in a "blind trust" for a few years while they set themselves to the task of regulating or not-regulating the industry they will then immediately go back to doesn't really make it a better idea.
Weiss' defenders—including Gene Sperling, a former senior economic policy maker in both the Obama and Clinton White Houses, and Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress—say that his policy stances largely line upwith Warren's positions. He has called for higher taxes on the rich and a more progressive tax code. Treasury Secretary Lew told the New York Times last month that Weiss opposes US companies moving overseas to avoid domestic taxation—even though his firm has helped companies do just that.But his firm only did that because it was legal, and because they could make money on it. No doubt his desire to stop it is sincere, and will continue to be sincere even as his old colleagues explain to him how cracking down on such a thing would damage the Freedom of the Market greatly.
Again—we can freely assert these things to be true, but these are the same rationales advanced for every single Treasury nominee being momentary pulled off the Wall Street treadmill for a temporary regulator's job. They're all putting their millions in a blind trust, they all have America's best interests in mind, they all will act against their industry without bias. And yet, somehow, our policies towards damaging Wall Street practices never get any tougher, and the consolidation of power in that same small collection of companies continues to grow, and our focus never quite spreads out to the needs of the non-investment-banking nation.
So maybe that's not working out, then. Maybe filling the top Treasury positions with a steady stream of individuals whose interests lie in one and only one facet of the nation's monetary policy has led to stiflingly narrow thinking. This isn't a question that any Senator should have to "lead the charge" on; after the repeated financial screw-ups of the last few decades it should be bloody obvious.
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