I keep hearing, about the banking defaults, that regulators were “asleep at the wheel”, and that’s why it happened. After hearing about Barney Frank’s role in dismembering his own regulatory legislation it has become clear that the authorities were not “asleep” at the wheel. They were actually wide, wide awake.
Frank, who helped craft the legislation imposing tighter regulations on banks after the 2008-09 crisis, was hired by– guess who– “Signature Bank” for two years for $2 million. In that role, he lobbied congress to emasculate his own “Dodds – Frank” package of regulations, which enabled Signature Bank to more than double in size with little regulatory oversight. A Republican congress passed the reforms and Trump signed it.
Nobody was asleep. They were wide, wide awake.