With the Assange dcoument about bank regulations being released, it is good to go back to Elizabeth Warren.  Here she is discussing her role on COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel to which Harry Reid, Speaker of the Senate,  appointed he when she was teaching at Harvard.

We forget what the difference between banks and insurance companies and other public companies is.   Banks handle other peoples’ money. Not theirs.

Oversight of banks is in the interest of the public good.  Because bankers act like they do not have the public responsibility, they reset oversight.

Here is Warren on the nerve this comimittee was sriking when they asked members of th ebaning community to tesify. (COP did not have subpoena power, so people could come or not as theywished.)

Hank Greenberg, by then the fromer CEO of AIG, called Warren and demanded to see her in her offices at Harvard. He did not dispute the conclusions of the COP: the wild risk-taking at AIG and its risk to the entire economy. Instead he wanted to talk about why he was under-appreciated as a great CEO.

When he was unable to persuade Warren that AIG had been a messy risk tangle under his leadership, he turned his anger on Eliot Spitzer, the former Atotrney General of New York State. When that didn’t get him anywhere where gave up.

Warren’s conclusion: executives of large financial institutions have very different world views than other people.  If these companies did not have in trust so much money that was not theirs, this egocentrism might not be so consequential.   But we have given banks an advantage. They get, manage and profit from other peoples’ money and they are considered so indispensable to the economy that we will not let them fail when they deserve to. At least if we don’t let them fail, we should put some fo their leaders in jail.