A Fighting Chance

So what is it about finance that makes women so scarce in the corner offices? And why indeed were three women now the sheriffs of Wall Street? I can’t answer for Sheila or Mary, but I do have a thought about why I had ended up in this position: I was an outsider. I had never inhabited the cozy world of high finance, never played golf with a foursome of CEOs, never smoked cigars at the club.

Some people argue that if you’re never in the club, you simply can’t understand it. But in this case, I think not being in the club means never drinking the club’s Kool-Aid. I had studied the banking system from the outside, so none of it was sacred to me. I thought most of the finance guys were smart, but not any smarter than a lot of other people I knew. Sure, they made a lot more money, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be blind to a catastrophe happening right in front of them or that they wouldn’t be willing to skirt the rules if it would plump up the bottom line.

Late one evening while we were working on a COP report, Damon told me a story he’d heard from someone who had participated in a memorable event. Not long after COP had first come on the scene with our plainly worded ten questions, there was a small, private going-away party for Secretary Paulson, held at some swanky establishment. The stock market had crashed and the economy was teetering, but there were toasts and backslaps over Paulson’s superb tenure as Treasury Secretary and his handling of the crisis. As the evening drew to a close, the conversation turned to COP. After some general harrumphing about our work, someone mentioned my name. Said one participant, “She just doesn’t get it,” and everyone nodded in agreement.

I asked Damon if he knew whether any women had been present. “Nope,” he said. “From what I heard, no women.”

I didn’t think so.

What If She Finds Out?



I stayed with COP until September 2010, when I took another Washington job. In nearly two years of tangling with the Treasury Department and the big banks about TARP, I’d say we came away with a win-some, lose-some scorecard.

The losses were obvious. We didn’t have the power to stop Treasury from flooding the big banks with nostrings-attached TARP funds, and for the biggest financial institutions, Too Big to Fail became the new reality. We didn’t have the authority to launch criminal investigations, and no senior banking executives were marched out of their offices in handcuffs. We were never able to prod Treasury to provide the little banks with faster help, and by September 2010, more than three hundred small banks and credit unions had failed. We were never able to push anyone to get enough credit flowing to small businesses, and 170,000 of them folded as well.

All that was bad enough, but what really ate away at me was that we were never able to get the Treasury Department or the White House to do something meaningful about foreclosures. The president chose his team, and when there was only so much time and so much money to go around, the president’s team chose Wall Street. America had the biggest bailout fund in history, and the Goliaths of banking gobbled it up. Meanwhile, millions of people lost their homes, and even now, years after the crash, millions more are scrambling to pay down underwater mortgages. I still think about Flora, and I still think about Mr. Estrada—and I know there are millions of people just like them.

In my darkest moments, what really shut me down was this: COP couldn’t change a system that seemed hell-bent on protecting the big guys and leaving everyone else by the side of the road.

But we also had some wins, and some of them were big. We blew the BS whistle more than once, a lot of people heard us, and some of those hidden policy decisions moved into public view. COP helped put money in the pockets of the American people. Our July 2009 report about the bonuses owed to the taxpayers helped return billions to the US Treasury. Under Naomi’s capable leadership, we built a world-class team of experts and investigators. As just one more example of their superb work, the team’s analysis of the auto bailout backed up the government, making it clear that the decision to save an industry—and an estimated 1.1 million jobs—was well grounded in both law and economic policy. And although we didn’t stop Too Big to Fail, we sure did make a stink about it. I also think we helped shine a spotlight on a too-cozy, too-Byzantine, underfunded regulatory system that had utterly failed when it was most needed—and that spotlight spurred on those who would later push for real financial reform in the aftermath of TARP.