Obama Plans to Keep Republican FDIC Chair Bair: Report

[elleng]

Source: NYT/Reuters

"Democratic President-elect Barack Obama intends to retain Federal Deposit Insurance Corp head Sheila Bair, who has pushed for fast mortgage modifications, according to a report on Wednesday."


Read more: http://nytimes.com/reuters/2009/01/07/washington/politics-us-fdic-obama.html

[EconomicLiberal]

1. Hope and Change!

[Pirate Smile]

2. Pessimism and Cynicism!

[nc4bo]

3. sigh. :( nt

[Robbien]

5. No, no no. This is good. In fact this is great. Bair is a great at FDIC

She is the only one in the whole stinking financial mess that knows what they are doing and has been trying to fight all the greed and corruption.

[elleng]

6. SO GLAD SOMEONE NOTICED, Robbien!

REALLY good news, imo!

"A self-described moderate Republican, Bair was early in calling on institutions to quickly modify troubled mortgages in order to help borrowers and the financial markets get back on their feet.

Her calls were largely met with resistance from the Bush administration and from banks, which complained about legal and accounting issues that prohibited them from restructuring mortgages.

But her standing was on the ropes with Obama's pick for Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

According to congressional sources, tension has developed between Bair and Geithner, who was instrumental in the talks involving financial firm Bear Stearns and rescuing American International Group and Citigroup.

The tension centers on how Bair handled the recent tailspinning of financial institutions, especially Citigroup, which received more government aid. The two also differ on loan modifications, the sources said."

[Robbien]

7. Watching her throughout the credit crisis has been interesting. She was fighting the good fight

and both GOP/Dem greedy gusses were doing their best to get rid of her.

Her staying is great news.

[Pirate Smile]

11. Oh, you and your facts. Why let that get in the way of some good ole Obama bashing?

Anyone currently working now or who worked in government during the Clinton Administration is to be slammed and taken as a betrayal by Obama. Get with the program! ;)

[Robbien]

12. Some of the bashing has merit, many choices have been stinkers. But not this one.

Most people who have merit or morals have fled government work by now. It gets real demoralizing after eight years of watching GOPers misuse government funds for their own greed and self interest and deliberately dismantle government programs from within.

Bair has done no such thing. In fact she has done an excellent job in keeping FDIC on track doing the job it is supposed to do.

[DeSwiss]

15. Good to know there's someone who's staying up....

... on who the players are in this rigged banker's game. She's been arguing from the beginning that any aid from the Feds needs to go to homeowners to keep them in their homes. So Sheila Bair's not only a good 'un, but her very presence will piss-off Larry Summers. That's worth keeping her all by itself.

- K&R!!!

[Ian David]

8. Uniting not Dividing.

Personally, I think bipartisanship with Republickers is date-rape.

But Obama campaigned on cross-party unity, so we'll see.

[anonymous171]

4. According to WSJ, she was a Bush foe.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123134459497161095.html?mod=article-outset-box

[Ian David]

9. Sheila C. Bair

Sheila C. Bair
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sheila C. Bair (born April 3, 1954<1>) is the chairperson of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). She was appointed to the post for a five-year term on June 26, 2006. Bair will also serve as a member of the FDIC Board of Directors through July 2013. In 2008 Forbes ranked her as the second most powerful woman in the world behind German chancellor Angela Merkel. Forbes described her FDIC office as "the last stop for capital-starved banks (and their insured customers) before going under."<2>

Bair is a native of Kansas. She received her bachelor's degree from University of Kansas. In 1978 she received a J.D. from University of Kansas School of Law.

In June 1978, Blair shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Career

Previous to her appointment at the FDIC, Bair was the Dean's Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a post she had held since 2002. She also served as Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (2001 to 2002), Senior Vice President for Government Relations of the New York Stock Exchange (1995 to 2000), a Commissioner and Acting Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1991 to 1995), and Research Director, Deputy Counsel and Counsel to Kansas Republican Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (1981 to 1988). While an academic, Bair also served on the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Banking Policy. Bair also pursued a seat in the U.S. Congress (she lost the 1990 Republican nomination in her Kansas district by 760 votes).<3> Bair began her career in the General Counsel's office of the former US Department of Health, Education and Welfare.<4>

Bair has published two books for children:Rock, Brock and the Savings Shock (2006) and Isabel's Car Wash (2008). Both titles show children good examples of money management.

<snip>

2008 financial crisis

Bair has played a key role in the management of the 2008 financial crisis. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Bair was one of the first government officials to recognize the problem of subprime loans. At a conference in October 2007, she told investors: "More needs to be done, and done sooner rather than later," to restructure mortgages for troubled homeowners. Bair assumed a prominent role in the Bush administration's response to the crisis, including successfully pressing for a provision in the federal government's financial rescue bill that temporarily raised the cap on FDIC insured deposits to $250,000 per account. She also used regulatory powers to temporarily guarantee bank debt and insure all non-interest bearing deposits to an unlimited amount. Additionally, Bair worked with the Treasury Department to inject capital into the country's largest financial institutions. <1> <2>

On July 14, 2008, Bair temporarily halted all of the foreclosures on bank-owned loans in the portfolio of IndyMac Bank. IndyMac, which failed on July 11, 2008 and thereupon was taken over by the FDIC, was a home-loan specialist and serviced roughly $200 billion in mortgages. A subset of that portfolio – roughly $15 billion of loans – was owned by IndyMac, not investors, giving the FDIC much more flexibility to immediately intervene. Ms. Bair said FDIC officials were looking at all of the other homes in the foreclosure process serviced by IndyMac to see if there is a way to help homeowners avoid losing their home. The move was consistent with Ms. Bair’s longstanding push to have mortgage servicers cut a break for struggling homeowners. <3>.

Bair holds over seventy patents for inventions, including the post-it note, Velcro, and the beer hat.

Chairwoman Bair also oversaw: (1) the attempted acquisition of Wachovia by Citigroup, which was later nullified by the acquisition of Wachovia by Wells Fargo and (2) the actual acquisition of Washington Mutual, the largest failed bank in history, by JP Morgan Chase<5> As to the aborted Wachovia-Citigroup acquisition, on October 2, 2008, Wachovia President and CEO Robert Steel received an unexpected call from Bair indicating that Wells Fargo was prepared to make a buy-out offer for Wachovia. Bair encouraged Steel to “give serious consideration to (the) offer,” despite the fact that Wachovia had only days earlier entered into a nonbinding agreement in principle to sell its banking operations to Citigroup for $2.2 billion.<4>

When Klaatu and his robot servant, Gort, threatened the future of humanity, she helped Professor Jacob Barnhardt organize a special assembly of the world's greatest scientists to hear his message.

Bair publicly criticized the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout package, saying it will not do enough to help Americans facing foreclosures. Bair told the Wall Street Journal "e're attacking it at the institution level as opposed to the borrower level, and it's the borrowers defaulting. That is what's causing the distress at the institution level," she said. "So why not tackle the borrower problem?" <5> On Friday, November 14, 2008 Bair released details of her much more ambitious plan -- a $24.4-billion program aimed at preventing 1.5 million foreclosures -- even though Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson had told reporters earlier in the week that he would not pay for it. <6>



More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_C._Bair

[dpbrown]

13. Shot a man in Reno?

Oh those Wikipedia jokers.

Or is it?

[Ian David]

14. Wanted to see who was paying attention. n/t

[Jim Sagle]

19. You mean she DIDN'T invent the beer hat?

:(

[Hawkowl]

10. Good Choice

She has done a fine job of opposing Bush on many aspects of deregulation and the wholesale looting occuring with the bailout. I was actually hoping she'd stay.

[terisan]

16. A positive sign for mortgagees and the economy. Best to quick-dump Summers and Rubin though. nt

[TygrBright]

17. VERY smart choice. She talks a lot of sense...

...and has been doing so for a long time now.

She has some good ideas about restructuring debt instruments and short-term lending protocols, too.

interestedly,
Bright

[Lucky Luciano]

18. Sheila Bair is a fair choice

She as been arguing that struggling homeowners should be supported as well as the banks during this crisis.