11 ms·

I 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 f

• fwlr 4y ago
  It’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 ago
    That'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?
• xwolfi 4y ago
  It s indeed amazing. I work in a big bank myself and the old arguments repeated over and over about our evils is completely incoherent from the inside, where there is an incompetent apathy group crossing a passionate group of financial stuntmen, balancing each other, under the very low tolerance eyes of various regulators fining us for the smallest fart. It simply doesnt fit the narrative outside that we re helping drug cartels or shits like that.
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Barney Fwank is not alright. He is corrupt like the rest of them. He knows nothing about banking and everything about corruption. There were not two people on Signature's board that were actual bankers.
• tashi 4y ago
  Well, since lack of bank regulation almost destroyed the economy a little while ago, having a job that comes with incentives to reduce regulations is qualitatively different than those other options: more morally complicated, more dangerous. The interviewer may have expected that fact to be self-evident to his readers, and that Barney Frank's unwillingness to engage with it, and to try to deflect in order to "win the argument," would speak for itself.
  • fwlr 4y ago
    Maybe that was their plan, yeah. Barney’s argument seemed to be “if you’re tough on banks as a legislator it’s good to go work at a bank after leaving Congress; if you’re soft on banks as a legislator it’s bad to go work at a bank after leaving Congress”. If you approach it with sufficient distrust of politicians/bankers and insufficient understanding of the regulation I can see that argument being unconvincing. (Unimportant nitpick: one option being more morally complicated and more dangerous than the others is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference.)
• anyfactor 4y ago
  We kinda as a society and all that, expect people working in government to have some saintly features. For people who are selected and elected to positions within a government. The power held through working in a government clearly doesn't justify their documented benefits. So, we do hope these individuals to possess monk like qualities with a self sacrificial mindset. Even though their argument for working in social and civil reform institutes does sound reasonable at first, but I think it is controversial. I think fundamentally progressive ideas does not win through democratic process. They are disruptive ideas that represent a minority of people. Through an incredible movement these reforms gain democratic edge. But politicians are elected to democratic process and presently compared, they often aren't the ideal persons to led a progressive movement, they have too much skin in the game and can hold back free flowing progressive and disruptive ideas.
  • fwlr 4y ago
    I think you might find Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions interesting; he argues that it’s only about half of society that has this view you describe (expecting people in authority to be somewhat saintly, self-sacrificing, or monk-like), and the other half has a very different view.
    • anyfactor 4y ago
      That is interesting. I am not very educated on Sowell's views beyond his interviews on the Hover Institute YT channel. I will take a deeper look. Thank you for your recommendation.
• hughw 4y ago
  His name is on "the biggest financial regulation in a generation". Then he works for a bank and advocates for weakening that law. His advocacy carries more weight than most people since he wrote the original law. The bank paid him to do that. You don't need a degree in finance to see that that's corrupt. Barney's great at bickering and obscuring the point.
  • fwlr 4y ago
    From the article we are discussing: “You passed the biggest financial regulation in a generation. Then you went to work on the board of directors of a bank, and then after that you supported weakening certain requirements.” “No, no. Wrong. Wrong on sequence. I supported [weakening certain requirements] before I even heard of the bank. I decided that there was one area where we had been mistaken and began advocating, correcting this. … The events are that I made an independent decision, without regard to being on a bank board, that I had made a mistake. When I went on a bank board, I should stop believing the conclusion I had come to?” Also from the article and already reproduced in a sibling comment is the first statement Barney made in the interview, to the effect that he is on public record pushing for these weakenings in 2012, long before he joined (or was even aware of the existence of) Signature Bank.
• ElevenLathe 4y ago
  > 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? No, these are totally different things. Congress does not "regulate" gay rights organizations and affordable housing charities, and you presumably are not being paid to do these things. If you are, then obviously stop that. If you feel strongly about the cause, do it for free. On the other hand, Congress (and you personally) does (did) regulate Signature Bank heavily and have (had) lots of opportunities to shape public policy to benefit /specifically the officers and shareholders of this bank, which also employs you/. The suggestion that these things are equivalent is obviously an argument in bad faith.
• than3 4y ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure what point you are trying to get at from reading your comment, its all disjointed without a clear overarching point. If you're trying to say that regulators should be able to go and work for the people they were regulating, that shows a significant lack of understanding about how corruption has worked in actuality. The reason many countries have blackout periods where regulators are forbidden from receiving any kind of funding from the people they were regulating afterwards is because when its allowed, corruption occurs, and the cost to prosecute it is almost always high. The more centralized and heavily regulated the area is, the more prevalent it is, and worse the enforcement arm becomes less effective at a general cost to the public (look at the SEC). There are a number of legal ways that bribes and payoffs may happen without blackout periods (i.e. where they can't accept a position with any company doing business in areas they oversaw), and while a number of these loopholes have been closed, there are still many avenues where sophisticated bad actors can easily get around law intended to punish corruptive behavior such as with blind trusts set up for education, where there is only one beneficiary but its set up as a lottery. Corruption should be rooted out, and heavily punished because it causes harm to the public good, its insidious and pernicious in regulated areas.
  • fwlr 4y ago
    I’m trying to say that a journalist set out to make a banker look like a corrupt hypocrite, the banker made the journalist look like a fool instead, and then the newspaper committed a hilarious act of mild betrayal by publishing it.
    • ashwagary 4y ago
      >the banker made the journalist look like a fool instead, Certain readers would takeaway that he deflected where a person of integrity and good faith would use the opportunity to steelman and address the core conflict of interest criticism put forth.
      • fwlr 4y ago
        Sure, I’m not trying to prescribe the reader’s takeaway here.
• cykros 4y ago
  He is -- bankers get a lot of hate based simply on the fact that the average person doesn't actually understand much about banking. The big salaries you hear about aren't there because banks are greedy; they're there because bank shareholders know that banking is hard, and you need to make sure you can command the best person for the job. It doesn't always work out, but that's the goal. Shareholders don't give up dividends for fun, in any industry. If you don't take risk, you lose market share (and really, risk is where liquidity originates from -- it's the whole reason we have banks; otherwise, we'd all just wait until we have enough cash to buy what we want). Too much risk, and you blow up. Which would be all fine and good, except not enough and too much aren't ever clearly delineated until after the fact.