Tag Archives: central banker

By William K. Black

In November 2011, President Correa appointed Pedro Delgado as head of Ecuador’s Central Bank.  The appointment was controversial.  The obvious controversy was that Delgado is Correa’s cousin.  Conservatives claimed that Delgado lacked integrity.  Some progressives shared the concerns about his integrity and saw Delgado as too supportive of Ecuador’s largest banks and bankers.  The recent banking crisis, in which the owners and managers of Ecuador’s four largest banks began a bizarre campaign of threatening to induce a run on their institutions to extort Correa into withdrawing his very sensible program of increasing the banks’ taxes and reforming the bankers’ dangerously perverse executive compensation, provided a test of these concerns by Correa’s supporters about Delgado.  I explained how irresponsible the banking oligarchs’ campaign was in interviews in Ecuador and the U.S. and an article.  I explained the vigorous manner in which U.S. regulators of my era would have acted to end the oligarchs’ efforts to extort the government and people of Ecuador by threatening to cause a banking run. Continue reading →