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<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/big-banks-ticking-time-bomb-could-cause-the-next-recession/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/big-banks-ticking-time-bomb-could-cause-the-next-recession/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Big banks’ ticking time bomb could cause the next recession</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Maureen Nevin Duffy / DC Report February 12, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The art of hiding multi-trillions of dollars of debt has found an eager accomplice, the businessman who once proudly proclaimed, “I love debt”: Donald J. Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The King of Debt is now in control of an obscure federal watchdog agency intended to prevent derivatives—complicate financial instruments that billionaire businessman Warren Buffett once described as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”—from causing the Great Recession of 2008. Intended is the keyword. The agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was hog-tied by big money interests long before the first whiff of bank failure could drift from Wall Street’s canyons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This December, Trump’s hand-picked CFTC members marked a decade of financial recovery by voting 3-2 in favor of leaving a giant hole in the regulatory framework known as Dodd-Frank. The vote leaves the Big Four—Too Big to Fail—U.S. banks free to slip the riskiest of their debt-deferring derivative trades through that defensive wall at will. And, this sleight of hand pushes an unsuspecting public onto the firing line of another possible multi-trillion-dollar U.S. taxpayer bailout.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As in the 2008 meltdown, the weapon of choice for manipulating and moving piles of bank-owned debt around the world is a type of derivative called a “swap.” A swap can be as simple as a contract between two parties or a contingency laden nightmare, such as a “naked” credit default swap (CDS) for trading unfunded payment obligations, some of which are used as “insurance” guarantees. That guarantee is what banks can continue now to switch on and off at will.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Usual Suspects</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead of home mortgages, this time consumer debt holds our fate. Outstanding balances keep ballooning for car and tuition loans and credit cards—greatly enlarged by exotic trading on the debt itself. During 2016, banks opened 110 million new credit card accounts about 50% more than in 2010. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo reported a combined loss of $12.5 billion from credit card loans in 2017. In June that same year, the Federal Reserve valued outstanding credit card loans at $1.02 trillion. Yet banks continue to shower subprime borrowers with fresh lines of credit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Despite the efforts of a severely hobbled CFTC, the swaps markets continue to grow and without the depth of transparency promised. Consider that the four big U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers: Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America handle close to 90% of U.S. swaps trades, representing a combined notional value of $300 trillion, while consumers stagger under debt and defaults mount higher than pre-2008<b>. The big picture reveals “a financial infrastructure that mimics the failed financial engineering created in the mortgage markets leading up to the 2008 financial crash,” says Professor Michael Greenberger, former deputy to the Clinton-era CFTC Chair Brooksley Born.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>‘Dark Swaps’</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greenberger, a former director of the Division of Trading and Markets, and current law school professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, contends that “dealers have engineered a way to evade Dodd-Frank, by helping banks transfer trillions of dollars in liability in risky unfunded trading, by turning the regulations off at will.” The world’s debt burden is being “financialized,” he says, as were mortgages in 2007. The tool this time is “dark swaps”‘ sold by the banks’ foreign subsidiaries, into increasingly complex instruments. These are the very exposures from which the CFTC and Dodd-Frank were charged with protecting us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The CFTC is totally controlled by Trump,” Greenberger tells DCReport.org. Until another administration takes office the only recourse may be a state by state solution. Greenberger means the state attorneys general, “since the president can’t fire them,” he says. Short of that, since a chain of attempts to plug the loophole have been tried, undermined or overturned, Greenberger’s last hope is the new administration, whose CFTC board could vote to close the loophole and spare the world another multi-trillion meltdown the U.S. taxpayer will suffer to pay.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></p></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/wall-streets-corruption-runs-deeper-you-can-fathom">https://www.alternet.org/wall-streets-corruption-runs-deeper-you-can-fathom</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[quite long]</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the myriad policy decisions that have brought us to our current precipice, from the signing of the </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement&source=gmail&ust=1544213295564000&usg=AFQjCNFqHPGJFP7w-eFZxziKo0ZbDMWdyw" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to the invasion of Iraq and the </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/Ratf-ked-Your-Doesnt-Count/dp/1631493213/ref%3Dsr_1_1?s%3Dbooks%26ie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1544059248%26sr%3D1-1%26keywords%3Dratfucked&source=gmail&ust=1544213295564000&usg=AFQjCNG51oiaKp5uZUQKWLEKL7jLMR7pWA" href="https://www.amazon.com/Ratf-ked-Your-Doesnt-Count/dp/1631493213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544059248&sr=1-1&keywords=ratfucked" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">gerrymandering</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> of House districts across the country, few have proven as consequential as the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">demise of <b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%25E2%2580%2593Steagall_legislation&source=gmail&ust=1544213295564000&usg=AFQjCNGPNaIifjwVVRnm-ChkJo2yWc0KgQ" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Glass-Steagall</a>.</b> Signed into law as the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression. But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Carmen Segarra might have predicted as much. As an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, she witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand. In her new book, “<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/Noncompliant-Whistleblower-Exposes-Giants-Street/dp/1568588453/ref%3Dsr_1_1?s%3Dbooks%26ie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1544052340%26sr%3D1-1%26keywords%3Dnoncompliant&source=gmail&ust=1544213295564000&usg=AFQjCNEhFbqwuRhDLv99BcJu4nnl-D-yA" href="https://www.amazon.com/Noncompliant-Whistleblower-Exposes-Giants-Street/dp/1568588453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544052340&sr=1-1&keywords=noncompliant" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street,</a><em>” </em>she chronicles the recklessness of institutions like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of the worst crashes in our nation’s history.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They didn’t want to hear what I had to say,” she tells Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used—criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Segarra also explains why she decided to blow the whistle on the Fed,</b> and what she ultimately hopes to accomplish by telling her story. “I don’t like to let the bad guys win,” she says. “I’d rather go down swinging. So for me, I saw it as an opportunity to do my civic duty and rebuild my life. … I was very lucky to be blessed by so many people who I shared the story to, especially lawyers who were so concerned about what I was reporting, who thought that the Federal Reserve was above this, who thought that the government would not fail us after the financial crisis, and who were livid.”</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><interaction data-token="5b96855f8198b4e625350260" data-context="true" data-tags="" data-fallback="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></font><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Noncompliant” explores one of the darkest chapters in modern American history, but with a crook and unabashed narcissist occupying the Oval Office, its lessons are proving remarkably timely. “We live in a culture where we reward bad behavior, we worship bad behavior, and it’s something that needs to stop,” she cautions. “Changing the regulatory culture on [a] U.S. governmental level is something that’s going to take a decade, maybe two. And we need to start now, before things get worse.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Listen to Segarra’s interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Robert Scheer:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hi, I’m Robert Scheer, and this is another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. Today, Carmen Segarra. She’s written a book, just came out, called “Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street.” And boy, did she ever. Perhaps you remember this case; it was in 2011, two, three years into the Great Recession. There was a lot of pressure from Congress that these banks be regulated in a more serious way. As a result, Carmen Segarra, someone of considerable education, was brought in. And she was assigned to do a survey of Goldman Sachs, to go over to Goldman Sachs. And I just want to preface this, people have to understand that not only is the Federal Reserve an incredibly—the most important economic institution in the United States, but the</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> New York Federal Reserve plays a special role being in New York. And they are basically entrusted with regulating the banks, and they are the institution that most definitely failed in that task, and helped bring about the Great Recession. Would you agree with that assessment?</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Carmen Segarra:</strong>Yes, I would agree with that assessment. When I joined the Federal Reserve, as you pointed out, I was hired from outside the regulatory world, but within the legal and compliance banking world, to help fix its problems. And I was well aware of the problems that existed. And scoping the problems itself was relatively easy; I mean, within days of arriving, I had participated in meetings where you had Goldman Sachs executives, you know, lying, doublespeaking, and misrepresenting to regulatory agencies without fear of repercussions. And where I saw Federal Reserve regulators actively working to suppress and expunge from the record evidence of wrongdoing that could be used by regulatory agencies, prosecutors, and even the Federal Reserve itself to hold Goldman Sachs accountable. The question was, when I arrived, you know, are these problems fixable? And, spoiler alert: I don’t think so.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">RS:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Well, your book really is a compelling read on, really, what one could consider the dark culture of finance capital. Most of us know very little about it; we think it’s boring, it’s detailed and so forth. And I was thinking of another woman observer of great education and experience, who first tipped me off as a journalist when I was trying to cover the stuff about banking deregulation and so forth, and when Clinton was president and they did the basic financial deregulation. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A woman named Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and she had your kind of background, you know; a leading lawyer with the banks, and so forth. Understood this a lot better than most of the men who were powerful, including Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; Lawrence Summers, who took over from him and went on to be the head of Harvard; Alan Greenspan–none of them really understood these collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps; she did.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> She blew the whistle on it, and they basically destroyed her. She was forced out of the Clinton administration, and what have you. Did you know about Brooksley Born’s work when you got into this? Do you have any sense? I mean, this was really sort of the first major whistleblower, and she was, as you have been, basically pushed aside.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>CS:</strong>Yes. I definitely knew about her. And you know, I have to say that I was, you know, just taking that historical perspective, which I think is an important point of view through which we should approach this topic. I mean, I remember when I was in law school, I was one of the very first graduating classes to graduate into a post-Glass-Steagall world. From a 50,000-foot level, I think people have a better understanding of what that means, in the sense, you know, you have all of a sudden the securities and the banking products can get together. But from a practical standpoint, from a ground-zero level, where I was at, that essentially meant two things. From a professional standpoint, we studied and were aware of the fact that there were a bunch of people on one side of the aisle, the investment products side–you know, the collateralized debt obligations that you mentioned. And then there were people who were on the banking side; we’re talking, you know, for purposes of argument, credit cards and debit cards. And that these people, they may have known about their products, but they were highly specialized; they only knew about the one or two things that they touched, and they certainly didn’t know about them and how they interacted together. And one of the things that I remember studying were not just the cases of whistleblowers, but also discussing amongst our classmates, you know, what the impact would be of all of a sudden having a class or a series of classes, graduating from law school, with people who are focusing on banking and compliance, like I was, and who are having to understand both of these products and sort of how they interact together. And what, sort of visualizing what our work life would be like, in terms of reporting to people that had an incomplete understanding of how the banking world worked. So, yes, I was definitely aware; I understood perfectly where she was coming from. And she was very much a cautionary tale for the rest of us who are lawyers. In terms of, if you find yourself in these difficult situations, you sort of game out what potentially can happen. And I certainly took it into consideration when I was gaming out whether or not to whistleblow.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>RS:</strong>Well, before you get to the whistleblowing stage, I think you’re being too kind to what I personally think are people who should be considered as, or at least charged and examined often with what is criminal behavior. Because ignorance is really not a good defense; when they were called before congressional committees, these knowledgeable people admitted they really didn’t understand collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. And for people who are not that familiar, you mentioned Glass-Steagall. And what Glass-Steagall was, was one of the, really maybe the most important response of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s democratic administration to the Great Depression. And how did this terrible depression happen, how were the banks so irresponsible. And they decided the key thing was to separate investment banks from commercial bank; investment banks could be high-rollers, private money, you know what you’re doing, you have knowledge; and commercial banks where you’re basically protecting the assets of ordinary people, they’re not knowledgeable, they’re trusting your expertise. And eliminating Glass-Steagall eliminated this wall between the two kinds of banking. And the company that you went to observe<b>, Goldman Sachs, was an investment bank.</b> And by the working of that law, they should have been allowed to go belly-up when it turned out they had a lot of these dubious credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. To people who don’t know, a credit default swap was a phony insurance policy pretending to cover these things, but really there’s nothing backing it up. And somehow, in order to save them, they were allowed to announce they could do commercial banking. One could argue, in some ways, the barrier was lifted to help–Citigroup was of course the other one–Citibank. And these are two banks that the government stepped in to help and create this monster. Is it not the case?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">CS:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yeah, that’s absolutely the case. But there’s a couple of things that we need to keep in mind. I mean, I think that we’re all sort of educated enough to know that, you know, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so if a system can be corrupted, people that are allowed to grab hold of power will corrupt it–insofar and only for so long as we allow those people to have the ability and the power to corrupt it. So ultimately, talking about more or less rules, or different rules, is productive only to a point. Because ultimately what we’re talking about here is the haphazard, slap on the wrist,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> failure to truly enforce the rules and regulations equitably across the system. And that creates the imbalances that you see, for example, in Goldman Sachs, and that you see in the system in general. One of the things that happened as a result of Glass-Steagall coming down was that a lot of the investment bankers were allowed to take over the commercial banks. And those investment bankers knew nothing about banking, and Goldman is a great example of that. I mean, when I arrived three years in after the financial crisis, what was one of the things that was very shocking to me was going into meeting after meeting with Goldman senior management and hearing them lie, doublespeak, and most shockingly of all, insist that they didn’t have to comply with the law. And that is a problem.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Because a bank that doesn’t believe, or management at a bank that doesn’t believe they have to comply with the law–you bet they are not supervising their employees correctly, and they’re not incentivizing employees correctly in terms of how to do their job. So their behavior is injecting enormous risk into the system.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>RS:</strong>Why should they think they should comply with the law when they got the law written and they could get it rewritten? I mean, after all, the treasury secretary, who pushed in the Clinton administration, right, to get rid of this restraint of Glass-Steagall and allow companies like Goldman Sachs to cross that line, was Robert Rubin. And he had been a top executive at Goldman Sachs. In fact, people used to refer to it as Government Sachs, that they had people all over the government, and it was a revolving door. And I want to point out that what you did, which was really unique–you had the guts to record these conversations. When you finally got to have your say before Congress, you could be backed up because you had the record. And tell us about that record. The conversations you recorded are absolutely chilling in describing an atmosphere of cynicism; you know, corruption; contempt, actually, for the political process and for restraint and regulation.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>CS:</strong>Yeah. And I would sort of add that part of what the book sort of points out is that I didn’t really get my say. I mean, Congress did hold a hearing, but they did not invite me to testify. They didn’t want to hear what I had to say. And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used–criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable. We could have trial lawyers filing cases and holding these people accountable. Yet we can’t count on them to do it; we can’t count on the judiciary to do anything about it. I mean, when you read about what happened in my case in the book, it’s tragic, you know? It’s unbelievable.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>RS:</strong>Tell us about that. Because you had a judge who was actually deep into this system who threw your case out.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><h1 style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin: 0px 0px 5px; line-height: 1.2; display: inline; width: 510px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">The Women Who Were Right About the Economy</font></h1></div><div><h1 style="font-weight: 300; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin: 0px 0px 5px; line-height: 1.2; display: inline; width: 510px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bigthink</font></h1></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 22.4px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Who could have saved us from the global financial crisis? In a word, women. The release of the Federal Reserve’s </span><a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomc_historical.htm" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">transcripts</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> of policymaking meetings up to 2007 has shed new light on the machinations inside the central bank as the Great Recession dawned. One member of the Board of Governors cast in a positive light is </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: 600;">Janet Yellen</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, the vice-chair, who saw the potential for trouble in the </span><a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shadow-banking-system.asp#axzz2ILfsvnP0" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">shadow banking system</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. She isn’t the only woman who might have done a better job than the man who outranked her:</span>

<font color="#ff0000" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Brooksley Born.</b></font><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The former chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission </span><a href="http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-06-08/economy/32115465_1_derivatives-dodd-frank-act-cftc" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">warned</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> that the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 could lead to excesses in the derivatives markets. The act eliminated most monitoring and regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market where the subprime loan crisis exploded. But Born was overruled by Larry Summers, the Treasury secretary, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law.</span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: 600;">Alice Rivlin.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> As vice-chair of the Board of Governors and a possible successor to Alan Greenspan as chair, her resignation in 1999, just as the Fed began to raise interest rates for the first time in four years, came as a surprise. Her </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=YfQtskJWkTAC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=%22alice+rivlin+disagreed%22&source=bl&ots=VbGrPadDif&sig=644k0zun1o5EO691-wXFvWemuTA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=M4n5ULCZAcuF0QH1-IHoBA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22alice%20rivlin%20disagreed%22&f=false" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">view</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> of monetary policy the late 1990s suggests she correctly perceived the global economy as more fragile than Greenspan did; the markets’ crash in 2000 soon forced him to reverse course. She later</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/opinion/why-fight-the-surplus.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">criticized</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Greenspan for endorsing the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which ended up casting the nation into deep deficits.</span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: 600;">Sheila Bair.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> She chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation before, during, and after the financial crisis. A strong believer in aiding consumers more and big banks less, she </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/27/sheila-bair-timothy-geithner_n_1918753.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">dissented</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s view that bailing out big banks – some of which she said didn’t need the help – was the best way to get the economy back on its feet. She argued for more accountability, but she lost; the big banks got their money, with few strings attached.</span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: 600;">Christina Romer.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The first chair of President Barak Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/14/escape-artist-noam-scheiber_n_1276998.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none;">wanted</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> a much bigger stimulus package than the one he eventually proposed to Congress in 2009 - $1.8 trillion rather than about $900 billion. But before Obama even saw the plan, Summers, who was director of the National Economic Council, persuaded her to water it down to $1.2 trillion. The shortcomings of the initial package led Obama to pursue additional stimulus, an effort largely stymied by the Republicans in the Congress. </span>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Would we be better off today if these women had held the top jobs in economic policy rather than the men who steamrolled them? There’s no way to know for sure, but my guess is that, in at least a few cases, the answer is yes.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 22.4px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" style="" face="Times New Roman">===</font></p></div>