Courage Award Honors Two Women Who Warned Us
There has been much hand-wringing, not to mention finger-pointing, regarding who knew what, and when, about the financial calamities that have recently come to pass. However, Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair won't be counted among the willfully or accidentally ignorant: They've been named this year's winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award for sounding the alarm far ahead of time.
There has been much hand-wringing, not to mention finger-pointing, regarding who knew what, and when, about the financial calamities that have recently come to pass. However, Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair won’t be counted among the willfully or accidentally ignorant: They’ve been named this year’s winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award for sounding the alarm far ahead of time.
Bloomberg.com:
Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and Born, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until 1999, were honored for “political courage,” the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced yesterday [Wednesday] in a statement.
The policy makers “recognized that the financial security of all Americans was being put at risk by the greed, negligence and opposition of powerful and well-connected interests,” Caroline Kennedy, the foundation’s president and daughter of the late president, said in the statement.
Bair, 54, who took over the FDIC in 2006, was among the first regulators to prod the mortgage industry to modify loans at risk of foreclosure to help borrowers keep their homes as losses mounted after the collapse of subprime market. Born, 68, lost a fight to bring over-the-counter derivatives under the regulatory control of the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], after warning in 1998 that the contracts “pose grave dangers to our economy.”
“The catastrophic events of recent months have proved them right,” Kennedy said.
Additional links:
Read a tribute to Brooksley Born by The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel here.
Born was vindicated, according to this Bloomberg story from last November, when her warnings finally started sinking in — a decade later — among those she most wanted to take action.
Around that same time last fall, Bair was locking horns with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson over how to help homeowners who faced foreclosure, as this U.S. News & World Report article details.
Click here for Bair’s official FDIC profile.
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When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it.When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip?
If there's one person we'd want to see grill Goldman Sachs bigwigs about certain fishy pre-financial-meltdown practices in which they apparently engaged, such as their failure to give useful details about (continued).
Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan faced the proverbial firing squad, or in this case the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, to answer questions Wednesday about his leadership choices at the Fed with regard to some key factors that triggered the financial implosion in 2008.
It would be nice to blame Ronald Reagan for the economic meltdown, as Paul Krugman did recently, but the facts don't support it. Unfortunately, the real villains are closer at hand.
Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who is independent in spirit as well as party label, has placed a hold on President Obama’s nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but I see this appointment as further evidence that the president has entrusted his economic policy to the wrong people.
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