Legal Commentary

Knives Out for Elizabeth Warren

By Ethan Brown

Just two days ago, Yves Smith wrote of the "move to clip the wings of TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren."

Smith linked to a Politico piece piece about Warren which had some absurd anti-Warren quotes like "a number of people wonder if this is the new Warren commission or the congressional oversight panel."

Predictably, Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock joins the anti-Warren chorus with a post titled "TARP Watchdog Elizabeth Warren Blowing Her Credibility, Overstepping Her Bounds." [More...]

Weisenthal doesn't even bother to put together a cogent argument against Warren; he simply links to a few bloggers and a Forbes columnist who complain that Warren is "unqualified" and that "the highly specialized world of bank resolution is not one where she has, as far as I can tell, very much expertise."

I do not possess expertise in the "highly specialized world of bank resolution" but I applaud Warren for insisting on TARP transparency, for pointing out inconsistencies on bailout programs ("The banks have received 10 times more money than the auto industry and yet they're receiving different treatment; Are the banks better managed than the auto industry?") and for caring that the interests of taxpayers are represented in the whole TARP process ("The people who are subsidizing the activities of the banks through their tax dollars are the same people who are furnishing the high profits through consumer lending," Warren told the Wall Street Journal "In a sense, we're asking taxpayers to pay twice.")

And I don't think that Warren's outsider status makes her unqualified for the job: indeed, it's the insiders who seem most ill-suited to fundamentally reforming the financial system (see: Summers, Larry).

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).