Fortune let banks spin that the OTS was no worse than the other regulators. Here’s what the Post said about that in November:
In the parade of regulators that missed signals or made decisions they came to regret on the road to the current financial crisis, the Office of Thrift Supervision stands out…
OTS adopted an aggressively deregulatory stance toward the mortgage lenders it regulated. It allowed the reserves the banks held as a buffer against losses to dwindle to a historic low.
Fortune doesn’t even mention the agency’s radical deregulation stances of the last several years.
This kind of abject spinning by the industry needs to be aggressively countered by the press.
If you want to really know what’s going on, skip the Fortune poor piece, and head straight to the ones from the Post and the LA Times.
And break out your tiny violin for the banks.
The bankers say eliminating OTS would wipe out a culture that understands the needs of small thrifts...
Small thrifts? Small thrifts like AIG? It's well known that "too big to fail" institutions bought out small thrifts to provide themselves the option of choosing the toothless and corrupt OTS as their regulator.
#1 Posted by BillF, CJR on Thu 18 Jun 2009 at 05:23 PM