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Why Barney Frank went to work for Signature Bank
- fsagx 4y agoTLDR -- "It pays well." And other reasons...
- xwdv 4y agoPays well? Say less.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThe reason anyone works for a bank. They’ve got the money.
- smt88 4y agoI think the thrust of the article is: why did Frank go to work for this particular bank (that has now fallen apart) when he could likely have worked at larger banks and made even more money?
- loeg 4y agoMan patiently explains how banks works to journo who does not understand at all.
- ar9av 4y agoBarney Frank is the Director of Signature Bank, so naturally he'd make up conspiracies about why it was shut down rather than recognizing it as the danger that it is. Even more than the bank's reputation and his affiliation with it, if he were to admit a failing at the bank, it would be a personal blow to his legacy since the Dodd-Frank Act was specifically supposed to prevent this kind of shit from happening.
- RhodesianHunter 4y agoGiven that Trump gutted Dodd-Frank, what point are you making exactly?
- chrisco255 4y agoPresumably, a bank could follow any behavior dictated by the original Dodd-Frank Act voluntarily, if it was a good piece of legislation in the first place.
- MikeTheGreat 4y agoThe point of legislation like this isn't to support good actors who were going to make good choices regardless, it's to limit what bad actors will do when left to their own devices. If everyone did the right thing on their own then we wouldn't need laws to prevent wage theft, or false advertising, or people dumping toxic chemicals in rivers people might drink out of, or murder.
- chrismcb 4y agoI think the point is... you works think that the person who helped write the dodd Frank act, would probably follow it, even if it wasn't in law.
- creato 4y agoThat sounds nice but it’s childish, like suggesting people voluntarily pay more taxes than owed. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. It’s perfectly reasonable to follow the rules of the game while believing the rules can and should be be improved. Or in Barney Frank’s case, actually doing so.
- chrisco255 4y agoHow would the original Dodd-Frank legislation have stopped Frank's own bank from failing? Or is it the case that there are always inherent risks in banking and that no legislation is sufficient to prevent all failures? Perhaps even, sometimes legislation has unintended side effects that lead to adaptive behavior in the market which then causes a shift in risk patterns that then ultimately causes a different, altogether unforeseen disaster?
- bayareabadboy 4y agoCall me crazy, but this makes me think that there’s a chance that Barney Frank may be equally unqualified both to regulate banks and to manage them!
- smt88 4y agoWell, you'd hope someone who used to regulate banks (and will never go back to regulating them) would be a good candidate for managing a bank. In practice, yeah, it probably never happens.
- jollofricepeas 4y agoRegulators aren’t good candidates for managers and viceversa because… Being a regulator and a manager of a profitable enterprise have very few things in common. You don’t want your audit and compliance department calling the shots for a corporation. Just like the last thing you need is a CEO whether sales or engineer type making all of the risk, audit and compliance decisions.
- didgetmaster 4y agoA certain quote by Willie Sutton comes to mind...
- GreedClarifies 4y agoHa. So many words instead of "for the money".
- ghayes 4y agoFrank says it quite directly: > One: it paid well. I don’t have a pension and, having quit, I wanted to make some money.
- masshole 4y ago[flagged]
- clockworkhavoc 4y ago[flagged]
- timmytokyo 4y agoIsaac Chotiner has a reputation for totally destroying the people he interviews, something he does by letting the subjects hang themselves. I often wonder why anyone agrees to be interviewed by him. That said, Barney Frank managed to hold his own against Chotiner, perhaps better than any other interview subject I've seen.
- mc32 4y agoFrank held his ground and knows his subject. The interviewer tried to pierce through but failed in the face of Frank’s solid arguments.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FormerBandmate 4y ago“I don’t know enough about the housing sector. I was making—“ is a pretty terrible last question. Barney Frank’s retort is hilarious: You don’t know that much about banking, either. You’re not supposed to; you’re not an expert. It’s the exact same issue as with banking. If I ruled as off-limits anything I’d worked on when I was in Congress, I guess I’d be a monk. That being said, Barney Frank’s rationale of wanting to make money is pretty openly terrible, he doesn’t come of great either
- benjaminwootton 4y agoPeople need money to live, and even wanting to make a lot of it seems fair enough. Non competes don’t usually go down very well in these parts, so expecting someone to voluntarily step away from their area of expertise is a big ask.
- sokoloff 4y agoWhy do you work at whatever job you work at? If they said “we’ll keep everything else exactly the same, but starting Monday, we’ll only be paying you minimum wage”, would you change anything? I like what I do; I like my colleagues; I’m proud of what our teams have accomplished, but I’m very clear that I work for money.
- yieldcrv 4y agoWhen the revolving door goes wrong
- pauljurczak 4y agoNo it didn't. It worked as designed. Barney and most other revolving door users will keep their ill-gotten gains. Unfortunately, the revolving door very rarely goes wrong...
- yieldcrv 4y agoYes but it isn’t supposed to broadcast their incompetence and put all of their public service into question Its supposed to just show some slight signs of quid pro quo and thats it
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- flappyeagle 4y agoCan someone who actually read the article summarize?
- joe_the_user 4y agoDodd-Frank always seemed like a vague hodge-podge of stuff that, sure, strengthen regulators but didn't put many hard limits on banks. Regardless, Frank is correct that the agency that should have dealt with Signature's problems was the State regulator, not the Feds. The thing is that both SVB and Signature were these large commercial banks that didn't really do many commercial loans, they just bought bonds. That's more or less going to doom you to die sooner or later 'cause your estimate of the future value of a money isn't always going to be better than average. So regulators should have said something a while back, yeah. Why they didn't or couldn't is the question.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brianlawson 4y ago[dead]
- fwlr 4y agoI cannot believe the New Yorker published this complete evisceration of their own reporter. “Let me put it this way. As a congressman, you passed the biggest financial regulation in a generation. Then you went to work on the board of directors of a bank … I just wonder if going on bank boards and saying that you’re doing it in part because you want to make money is helpful. That’s all.” “Former members of Congress should not go to work on anything related to what they may have done while they were in Congress? Could I have become an official of a gay-rights organization? I spent more of my time during my years on gay rights than on financial reform. What about housing? I created programs to support affordable housing. I continue to try to work with that. Is that wrong?” “I think that’s a good place to end it.” “No, I want an answer to the question.” “I don’t know enough about the housing sector. I was making—” “You don’t know that much about banking, either. … If I ruled as off-limits anything I’d worked on when I was in Congress, I guess I’d be a monk.“ Absolutely brutal. Never thought I’d want to buy a banker a beer but this Barney guy is alright.
- fwlr 4y agoIt’s worth noting that the interviewer didn’t start out planning for a debate about members of Congress working in fields related to their congressional activity. The original plan was to pin the subject for his hypocrisy in trying to weaken his own legislation once he got hired by a bank. The subject was ready, though - the first thing he said was: “I came to the conclusion shortly after we passed the bill that fifty billion dollars was too low. I decided that by 2012, and, in fact, said it publicly. The reason I say that is that I didn’t go on the board of Signature until later. In fact, I had never heard of Signature Bank at the time when I began to advocate raising the limit. This is relevant, obviously, because Signature was a beneficiary of that.”
- TechBro8615 4y agoThat's because the interviewer is an activist, not a journalist, and a bad one at that. Barney Frank was simply the more intelligent person in this interview. The fact he had such an answer prepared shows he has thought about it over the years, far longer than the reporter spent thinking about a gotcha question based on the superficial premise of "revolving door bad." As for the reporter, the interview doesn't start any better than it ends. Those are some embarrassing questions based on factually incorrect premises, and Frank consistently corrects him, only to be told "well, look what the Washington Post said in 2018!" How embarrassing. I admire Frank's patience. Can you imagine a reporter childishly grilling you about your subject of expertise while insisting you're wrong?
- DeathArrow 4y agohttps://archive.is/UgXYv https://archive.is/UgXYv
- Overtonwindow 4y agoI come away with a strong feeling of crony capitalism.