Elizabeth Warren

Okay, so hard to enforce the law if you can't figure out who is on the other end of this, so the way this gets so tangled up is that private equity and REIT owners set up these complex legal arrangements to avoid transparency and to try to…

I appreciate the work you are doing in trying to keep nursing home residents safe.

Okay, so it is really important that taxpayer funds be protected. I appreciate your work on that, but of course, the main thing, too, is we want to make sure that patients have a safe, healthy place to live.

It is our duty to ensure that they are safe, but some of these facilities are in horrendous condition due to the greed of their corporate owners.

I've got an idea--a bipartisan idea that I'm introducing with Sen. Rick Scott today: get the big bankers off the Reserve Banks boards of directors.

The Fed's own report on the SVB failure identified problems high and low.

It is time to end the Fed's culture of corruption.

I think that the proposal from you and Senator Scott, which I have reviewed, does not go as far as I would like.

This is why Senator Rick Scott and I introduced a bipartisan bill today that would prohibit big bankers from serving as Reserve bank directors.

Senator Scott and I also introduced a bill, which was included in a separate bill with Sen. Tillis, to give the Fed a true, Senate-confirmed independent Inspector General to serve as an agency watchdog.

This is exactly the kind of deregulatory shift I warned about in 2018 when I opposed Powell's nomination as Fed Chair.

So it sounds like to me that this is clearly a case of the fox guarding the henhouse all the way through the system here.

So let me just get this straight. Two-thirds of the people that oversee each of the Reserve banks, and hand-pick the leadership, are elected by the very same banks that are regulated by the Reserve bank, and three of those people actually…

You do not get to write a law that shoves the Fed in a strictly deregulatory direction and then turn around and say, 'Gee, we wish they had not deregulated.'

The tailoring rules meant that Silicon Valley Bank, for example, did not have to do a lot of incredibly important things.

It is to say pull back on this regulation and give a green light for massive and undiversified growth.

That was just a massive neon light saying 'grow, grow, grow.'

The Fed failed at every step along the way, from the Board of Governors at the very top to the San Francisco Fed Bank examiners on the ground.

In our democratic system, bank supervisors, toiling in secrecy though they may be, must still answer to the people.

It is past time for us to remove private bankers from this public role.

This is not strong oversight. In fact, it is not even competent oversight.

Did they violate the rules? Yes, they violate the rules.

You know, particularly when you are telling me about Clarita, for example, corrected this later, yeah, he corrected it after you opened an investigation, which is just not exactly the moment that gives us all confidence.

This is suspicious timing, but you did not look into this trade as part of your investigation.

Then how could you say there was no evidence that anyone violated the rules? It clearly violated the rules.