New Economic Perspectives

By William K. Black
April 17, 2017     Bloomington, MN

William Cohan’s April 14, 2017 column in the New York Times discusses Daniel Tarullo’s swan song talk on bank regulation.  Here are the key passages from that column for the first half of my discussion.

Much to the relief of Wall Street executives, who feared and hated him in equal measure, Daniel K. Tarullo left his powerful perch on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors last week, but not before delivering one last lecture on how big banks should be regulated in his absence.

His swan song was pretty surprising, all things considered. It also went largely unnoticed, much like Mr. Tarullo himself during his eight years at the Federal Reserve. Many people have never heard of him, even though his decisions affected their lives in ways big and small.

Once described as the “Wizard of Oz,” for the power he wielded behind the scenes, Mr. Tarullo was appointed to the Federal Reserve by President Barack Obama in January 2009. At the Fed, Mr. Tarullo took over the important responsibility of regulating the big Wall Street banks, a job that, understandably, had been the purview of the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The oversight moved to Washington from New York in the wake of the financial crisis.

“It was obvious that a lot in the U.S. regulatory system had not worked particularly well before the crisis,” Mr. Tarullo said in a 2015 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Cohan was writing about a different subject, one I discuss briefly in the second half of this article, so he did not discuss the insanity described in these four paragraphs.  Here is the short version of that insanity.

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