From 5h ago
US government regulators should be able to levy fines against executives from collapsed banks, take back their compensation and bar them from continuing to work in the financial industry, Joe Biden said on Friday.
He called on Congress to pass legislation that would expand the powers of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – the Washington agency that insures bank deposits – to hold the leaders of collapsed financial institutions like Silicon Valley and Signature banks accountable.
“No one is above the law – and strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future. The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible. When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again,” the president said in a statement.
“Congress must act to impose tougher penalties for senior bank executives whose mismanagement contributed to their institutions failing.”
The president’s call comes after a week where the Biden administration acted forcefully to shore up the US financial system following the collapses of three banks in a matter of days. On Thursday, the government collaborated with some of the nation’s largest financial institutions to organize the $30bn rescue of First Republic, a medium-sized bank that was struggling to stay solvent.
Joe Biden called on Congress to allow US government regulators to take back salaries from executives of collapsed banks, as well as ban them from working in finance and levy fines against them. While his allies in the Senate seem supportive of the proposal, it remains to be seen if Republicans will get over their usual wariness towards regulation and back the move, even after the shakiness the US financial system showed in recent weeks. And, of course, there’s Donald Trump news: law enforcement is preparing for the possibility he could be indicted as soon as next week – and he’s back on YouTube.
Here’s what else happened today:
Special prosecutor Jack Smith has subpoenaed a bunch of people who work at Mar-a-Lago as part of his investigation into Trump’s possession of classified material.
Hunter Biden filed a countersuit against a Delaware electronics shop owner who is suing him for defamation. A key issue in Biden’s complaint is whether the laptop and other devices he allegedly left at the shop were actually abandoned.
No attorney-client privilege for Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran, a federal judge ruled, in what is potentially a major victory for Smith’s investigation of the former president.
Kevin McCarthy declined to say if he was on board with repealing the authorizations behind America’s involvement in the Gulf War and invasion of Iraq.
Biden keeps delaying the announcement of his re-election decision.
A federal judge has ordered Evan Corcoran, an attorney for Donald Trump, to provide more testimony to a grand jury convened by special counsel Jack Smith, saying there’s evidence the attorney may have been involved in a crime, CNN reports.
Corcoran had already spoken to the grand jury, but declined to answer some questions that he said would breach the confidentiality between an attorney and their client. According to CNN, district judge Beryl Howell granted Smith’s motion to compel Corcoran to answer those questions, saying evidence that he was hiding evidence of a crime outweighs the attorney-client exception.
Here’s more from CNN:
The decision hands Trump yet another loss under seal in court as his team and allies have tried to hold off Smith’s investigators from learning about direct conversations the former president had with some of his closest advisers.
The development is particularly notable because of accusations prosecutors would have made about Trump as they argued to the judge for the grand jury testimony.
Corcoran, an attorney-turned-witness, had previously testified to the grand jury but declined to answer some questions, citing attorney-client privilege. The department argued to the judge he should not be able to avoid answering, because his discussions with the former president may have been part of an attempt to plan a crime.
Howell’s ruling is one of her last on sealed grand jury disputes as chief judge. The Obama appointee has repeatedly green-lit Justice Department requests to pursue information about Trump’s actions during her tenure as chief of the DC District Court, but she rotates out of the administrative role on Friday.
When Corcoran first testified to the grand jury in January, he was asked about what happened in the lead-up to the August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Corcoran had drafted a statement in June that attested Trump’s team had done a “diligent search” and there were no more classified documents at Trump’s Florida residence.
After that, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and found hundreds of government records, including classified material, raising questions about the lawyer’s attestation.
Fox News’s streak of skepticism towards the House Republicans’ investigation of Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings continued today, when representative Byron Donalds made an appearance on the network.
Donalds outlined the latest evidence Republicans have made public in their investigation, which is led by the House oversight committee. Interviewer John Roberts then pressed him on whether anything they’d uncovered was illegal, to which Donalds admitted that there wasn’t any sign of that yet.
Here’s the exchange:
The House GOP has made investigating the Biden family a key part of its strategy in the current Congress, with the goal being to prove their longstanding allegations that the president is corrupt.
Republicans typically get a warm reception on Fox News, but for whatever reason, the network’s anchors seem dubious about the House GOP’s investigation of the Biden family.
Yesterday, one of Fox News’s longest-serving figures, Geraldo Rivera, chastized Republicans for bringing Hallie Biden, the widow of the president’s late son Beau Biden, into the investigation:
We’re almost near the end of a week that’s been marked by a scramble in Washington to stabilize the American financial system – and there’s no telling if the job is yet done. For more on how this all started, here’s the Guardian’s Edward Helmore:
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.
Why the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?
Federal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.
The Senate yesterday began the process of repealing the legal authorizations for America’s involvement in the Gulf war, and its invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.
While the resolution attracted significant GOP support and the votes of all Democrats in attendance, it still needs to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. NBC News reports the GOP’s leader Kevin McCarthy did not commit to bringing it up for a vote when asked today about the measure:
Michael Cohen is Donald Trump’s former lawyer and the intermediary who paid Stormy Daniels, allegedly to keep her from talking about her affair with the soon-to-be president in 2016.
Cohen has been talking to the Manhattan grand jury investigating the payment, and potentially determining whether Trump should be charged for it. He told ABC News today that he believes that there is enough evidence to indict Trump.
“I promise you and I promise the American people that all the information that is needed in order to create the indictment to get a prosecution and a conviction is in the hands of the district attorney,” Cohen said today in an interview.
Law enforcement agencies are getting ready for the possibility that Donald Trump will be indicted as soon as next week by the Manhattan grand jury investigating his alleged hush money payment to adult film actor and director Stormy Daniels, NBC News reports.
The grand jury empaneled by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is hearing evidence over whether Trump violated campaign finance law by paying Daniels to keep quiet about having an affair with Trump. The payment happened while Trump was first running for president in 2016.
According to NBC News, law enforcement agencies are assessing security around a Manhattan courthouse in case Trump is charged and travels to New York to answer the allegations. The FBI, New York police department and Secret Service are among the agencies involved, NBC reports.
Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has just finished addressing the St Patrick’s Day luncheon on Capitol Hill, attended by Joe Biden and hosted by the Republican House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
Varadkar congratulated McCarthy on his election to the position (following a tortured round of voting that held up the start of business of the 118th Congress in an unprecedented spectacle in January) and lauded him as an Irish American.
Varadkar also spoke of the importance of the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the decades of lethal conflict over the destiny of Northern Ireland, then turned his attention to the war in Ukraine.
He noted that Ireland is militarily neutral “but not politically neutral.”
“We stand with Ukraine, because silence means surrender, so we will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” he said.
Varadkar noted that history shows that “appeasement ultimately fails” and he added that: “Last century, America led the free world against fascism and communism, and America leads the free world again, and we thank you for that.”
Here’s our full report from Rory Carroll and Martin Pengelly on Varadkar’s US visit so far.
Joe Biden is speaking on Capitol Hill now at a luncheon to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. He and vice president Kamala Harris have been hosting the Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his partner Matthew Barrett in Washington today.
The taoiseach and the US president will take part in a ceremony at the White House later, where the Irish leader will present his counterpart with a bowl of fresh shamrocks, a symbol of Ireland.
Biden is wearing a green tie and a sprig of shamrocks in his breast pocket. He’s talking now about the Good Friday Agreement. He intends to visit the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the historic peace deal.
We’ll bring you any significant remarks in due course.
Varadkar is speaking now.
The US Department of Justice is investigating the Chinese corporate owner of video platform TikTok on suspicion of spying on Americans, according to a new report published moments ago.
The case involves the possible surveillance of US citizens, including some journalists covering technology, the New York Times reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the situation.
The Times reports further that:
The investigation, which began late last year, appears to be tied to the admission in December by the company, ByteDance, that its employees had inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including that of two reporters and a few of their associates.
The department’s criminal division, the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia are investigating ByteDance, which is based in Beijing and has close ties with China’s government, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
Confirmation of the investigation comes as the White House hardens its stance toward forcing the company to address national security concerns about TikTok. They include fears that China might be using the popular video service to gather data about or spy on Americans, undermine democratic institutions and foster internet addictions among young people.
Joe Biden is calling on Congress to allow US government regulators to take back salaries from executives of collapsed banks, as well as ban them from working in finance and levy fines against them. While his allies in the Senate seem supportive of the proposal, it remains to be seen if Republicans will get over their usual wariness towards regulation and back the move, even after the shakiness the US financial system showed in recent weeks. And, of course, there’s Donald Trump news: he’s back on YouTube.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Special prosecutor Jack Smith has subpoenaed a bunch of people who work at Mar-a-Lago as part of his investigation into Trump’s possession of classified material.
Hunter Biden has filed a countersuit against a Delaware electronics shop owner who is suing him for defamation. A key issue in the complaint is whether the laptop and other devices Biden allegedly left at the shop were actually abandoned.
Biden keeps delaying his announcement for re-election.
Sherrod Brown, the Democratic chair of the Senate banking committee, appears on board with Joe Biden’s call for harsher penalties on executives from collapsed banks.
“Working people and small businesses have been forced to pay the price for executives’ arrogance and recklessness too many times before. We need stronger rules to rein in risky behavior and catch incompetence,” Brown said in a statement.
“Our job on our committee is oversight, and we will be looking at all the ways we can protect working families’ money from risky bets that didn’t pay off in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. That includes holding accountable the executives who ran this bank into the ground and the regulators tasked with overseeing them, and it includes working to reform our laws to better protect workers, small businesses, and taxpayers from corporate greed.”
Any such tightening of regulations would need approval from both the Senate and the House, where the GOP majority has shown far less interest in tighter banking regulations, even after this week’s financial instability. And some corners of the Democratic party remain wary of blaming deregulation for the recent bank collapses. As Politico reported on Tuesday, several Democratic senators who in 2018 supported legislation loosening banking regulations said they did not regret their votes. Perhaps that’s why the new measures Biden is proposing do not include a reinstatement of those rules.
The measures Biden call for appear intended at making sure executives personally suffer for running their banks into the ground.
In a fact sheet, the White House points to reports that the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank sold more than $3mn in shares just before it collapsed, and calls for Congress to expand the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) ability to take back such money.
The Biden administration also notes that the FDIC can currently only ban an executive from working in finance if they have engaged in “willful or continuing disregard for the safety and soundness” of their previous bank. “Congress should strengthen this tool by lowering the legal standard for imposing this prohibition when a bank is put into FDIC receivership. The President believes that if you’re responsible for the failure of one bank, you shouldn’t be able to just turn around and lead another,” the White House said.
Finally, the White House says Biden wants to broaden the FDIC’s ability to levy fines, particularly against “negligent executives of failed banks when their actions contribute to the failure of their firms.”
“The President is eager to work with Congress to strengthen accountability in these three areas – and others that Members of Congress identify. As the President has said, in his administration, no one is above the law,” the White House said.
US government regulators should be able to levy fines against executives from collapsed banks, take back their compensation and bar them from continuing to work in the financial industry, Joe Biden said on Friday.
He called on Congress to pass legislation that would expand the powers of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – the Washington agency that insures bank deposits – to hold the leaders of collapsed financial institutions like Silicon Valley and Signature banks accountable.
“No one is above the law – and strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future. The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible. When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again,” the president said in a statement.
“Congress must act to impose tougher penalties for senior bank executives whose mismanagement contributed to their institutions failing.”
The president’s call comes after a week where the Biden administration acted forcefully to shore up the US financial system following the collapses of three banks in a matter of days. On Thursday, the government collaborated with some of the nation’s largest financial institutions to organize the $30bn rescue of First Republic, a medium-sized bank that was struggling to stay solvent.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
