A Fighting Chance

I don’t know for sure if anyone at the giant banks engaged in criminal activity in the months and years leading up to the financial meltdown. But that’s the point: I don’t think anyone knows for sure. Where were the full-scale public investigations? Where were the armies of auditors, seizing hard drives and poring over the financial statements? Where were the teams of regulators who were supposed to be checking the books all along? Where were the signs—any signs at all—that real resources were being devoted to a series of thorough investigations and that somebody with real power was taking this responsibility seriously?

Think of it this way. Big banks give their regulators certified financial statements every three months, year after year, showing that the bank is in good shape. Meanwhile, they sell billions of dollars’ worth of mortgages that stink to high heaven, dress those mortgages up in phony-baloney AAA-rated wrapping paper, and peddle them to retirement funds and local governments across the country. Then the banks suddenly need tens of billions of dollars in government money just to stay afloat. The government gives the banks the money but never puts major resources and manpower into finding out whether the sudden, gaping hole in the banks’ balance sheet was caused—at least in part—by illegal activity.

So the high-powered CEOs collect millions in bonuses, and Flora moves into her car. And the US government “foams the runway” for the giant banks, never seriously investigating whether the guys flying the planes were up to no good.





Sheriffs of Wall Street

In the spring of 2010, Time magazine called. They were writing a story on what they called “the new sheriffs of Wall Street,” and they wanted to interview me. The “hook,” as they called it, was that the three people they planned to feature were all women: Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC; Mary Schapiro, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and me. COP didn’t have nearly the power of the FDIC or the SEC, but that didn’t seem to matter to the editors at Time.

I hadn’t met Mary, but I already knew Sheila. She was a highly accomplished lawyer and academic who had been named by President Bush to be the chair of the FDIC back in 2006, when most people figured running the FDIC would be a pretty boring job. She had shaken up the place, pushing through reforms that strengthened oversight of the smaller banks and beefed up the FDIC insurance fund. Sheila and I had met a few years earlier, and recently I had been working in a group she led that was trying to help lower-income people get better access to banking services.

The three of us gathered for interviews and pictures. When the time came to put us together for the cover shot, the shoot director realized that I was considerably taller than the other two women and declared that this “simply won’t do.” But the Time people had come prepared. They brought out a box for Mary to stand on and a smaller lift for Sheila. Once our sizes were adjusted for the camera, we were told to look like sheriffs.

The whole situation seemed a little surreal, and we all got a good laugh out of it. In fact, I loved spending that time with Sheila and Mary. We fell into easy conversations about a lot of topics, including why it mattered that the person responsible for the banking insurance fund (Sheila) didn’t have the right lipstick color and whether it was significant that the person fighting to restore the effectiveness of a badly weakened SEC (Mary) was having trouble with her hair. Did guys have to put up with this?

But all three of us knew what this photo shoot was really about: it was an opportunity to deliver a message to a lot of people about why Wall Street needed to be held to a higher standard of accountability. And I suspect each of us felt that the cover story raised a question we’d all thought about, even if we didn’t dwell on it: Given that women were so conspicuously absent from the ranks of top executives in high finance, how was it that three women had ended up in leadership positions when it came time for the badly needed cleanup?

Over the next few years, Sheila, Mary, and I had several variations of that conversation. We always kept it light, but the topic touched a nerve. After all, of the twenty commercial banks listed in the Fortune 500 at that time, only one had a woman CEO. Just one. I’ve been going to financial conferences for a long time, and I’ve never seen a line in the ladies’ room.

And then there’s my little corner of the TARP world. During the nearly two and a half years that COP was in operation, ten panelists would come and go. Out of those ten, all were men except me.