The Warren Court

I have written before about the tyro Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren … see: Lizzy ... basically commending her for putting a bevvy of bank regulators on the hot seat for not bring criminal charges against any banking types for the 2008 financial meltdown.  Since then Senator Warren has, from her position on the bench of the Senate Banking Committee, embarrassed two more sets of financial officials testifying there:

1) She asked the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, why the “too big to fail” provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law have not yet been fleshed out and implemented.  She said that not only have the big financial-center banks gotten bigger since this act was passed, but that they are benefiting from a money-cost differential between themselves and the smaller regional banks ... to the tune of something like $83 billion per year.  (See: Huffington Post Story).  Bernanke gave a dismissive response even after Warren kept pressing him on this issue.  (I must add however that, after Bernanke’s testimony was over, one could see Warren rushing up to the Fed Chairman as he was exiting the hearing room, presumably with some backtracking words.)

2) And, more recently, Senator Warren pressed Treasury officials as to why officers of HSBC bank have not been prosecuted (and/or had serious sanctions imposed on the bank) for laundering considerable drug money whereas minor drug dealers end up in the poky, see: Reddit Reference.  (HSBC did pay a $1.92 billion fine which seems to indicate that these were pretty serious offenses.)

Please don’t misunderstand me.  Although I commend Ms. Warren on her aggressive cross-examination style from the bench of the Senate Banking Committee, I still have serious questions about her own ethics regarding her long-ago claims of minority Native-American status … and the character weakness she displayed in how she ran her campaign against the incumbent Senator Scott Brown.  So I am conflicted about my above paeans for this woman ... but I do hope she continues her aggressive judicial ways from the bench.