Bull by the Horns: Standing Up for Main Street Against Wall Street
Sheila Bair
Language: English
Pages: 504
ISBN: 2:00209039
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Sheila Bair took over as head of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2006, the agency was probably better known for the 'FDIC' logo on the doors of the nation's banks than for anything it did. Now Bair is at the center of the financial crisis, speeding the takeover of failing banks and pressing the mortgage industry to ease loan terms . . . winning praise from Democrats and Republicans." --BLOOMBERG NEWS, October 3, 2008
Sheila Bair is widely acknowledged in government circles and the media as one of the first people to identify and accurately assess the subprime crisis. Appointed by George W. Bush as the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 2006, she witnessed the origins of the financial crisis and in 2008 became--along with Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner--one of the key players trying to repair the damage to our economy. Bull by the Horns is her remarkable and refreshingly honest account of that contentious time and the struggle for reform that followed and continues to this day.
A level-headed, pragmatic figure with a clear focus on serving the public good, Bair was often one of the few women in the room during heated discussions about the economy. Despite her years of experience and her determination to rein in the private banks and Wall Street, she frequently found herself at odds with Geithner. She is withering in her assessment of some of Wall Street's finest, and her narrative of Citibank's attempted takeover of Wachovia is a stinging indictment of how regulators and the banks worked against the public interest at times to serve their own needs.
Bair is steadfast in her belief that the American public needs to fully understand the crisis in order to bring it to an end. Critical of the bank bailouts and the Can. $29.99 lax regulation that led to the economic crash, she provides a sober analysis as well as a practical plan for how we should move forward. She helps clear away the myths and half-truths about how we ran our economic engine into the ditch and tells us how we can help get our financial and regulatory systems back on track.
As The New Yorker said, "Bair has consistently stood out for her skepticism of Wall Street and for her eagerness to confront the big banks. A Kansas Republican, she has become an unlikely hero to economic liberals, who see her as the counterweight to the more Wall Street--centric view often ascribed to Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary" (July 6, 2009).
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First the Transition, Then the Crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Os EUA e a Nova Ordem Mundial - Um Debate Entre Olavo de Carvalho e Alexandre Dugin
of options to the WaMu board toward a private-equity group, TPG Capital, led by David Bonderman, who was close to Killinger and had served on the WaMu board in the past. From the standpoint of the shareholders, it seemed clear to me that an acquisition by Chase was the better course. Shareholders would not have to accept dilution, as they would with the TPG proposal, and it would remove any risk of a WaMu failure. At that time, Chase was probably the strongest bank in the world. In my email, I
a call from Hank Paulson advising me of a rumor that Wells was going to come back in with an offer to buy Wachovia without government assistance. He called back on Thursday to confirm that Wells was ready to make an offer. I was a bit perplexed that I still had not heard directly from Wells, so I contacted Bob Steel to see if he had heard from Kovacevich. He had not and was getting ready to board a plane, so he asked me to contact Jane Sherburne, Wachovia’s general counsel. In the interim, I
stand up and say that the FDIC was going to be guaranteeing everybody against everything in the $13 trillion banking system—and the Treasury and the Fed would be right behind me. It was an overreach of the worst sort, and there was no doubt in my mind that Tim Geithner was the instigator. For months, he had been arguing that the federal government should guarantee all the debt of U.S. financial institutions, but no one had taken him seriously—until now. I decided to play for time. Yes, of
had served in Bob Rubin’s Treasury. Lawrence Summers, his deputy, who would go on to serve as Treasury secretary, would head the National Economic Council; Gary Gensler, his colleague at Goldman Sachs who had later served as his undersecretary at Treasury, would head the CFTC94; and Michael Barr, who had served as a lower-level deputy assistant secretary, would serve as Summers’s lieutenant. (Barr would later be appointed to my old job as assistant secretary for financial institutions at
$45 billion of TARP into common equity, planning to sell those shares off to private investors. Citi would never have to pay back that $25 billion. As a consequence, even with a 1-for-1 standard, Citi would have to raise only $20 billion to repay the remaining $20 billion in TARP funds. It needed every penny of that capital. We also insisted that the capital increase be done with common equity newly issued to the open market. That was the only way we could be sure that the TARP exit process
