by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Randal Quarles is the Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board. This is the most important position among Federal regulators when it comes to sniffing out and preventing the kind of systemic in-house bank frauds that collapsed much of Wall Street in 2008 and brought on the greatest U.S. economic downturn since the Great Depression.
On November 26, 2018, Quarles was also appointed to a three-year term as Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international standard-setting body for financial stability around the globe.
Financial stability at the largest global banks that Quarles oversees is looking less certain today than it has since the last financial crisis. Quarles is playing a key role in helping Fed Chairman Jerome Powell establish emergency lending facilities that are making trillions of dollars in revolving loans to Wall Street banks and trading houses while simultaneously telling the public that the banks he supervises are “well capitalized.” (If they are well-capitalized, why do they need these trillions of dollars from the Fed — a money spigot that began months before the coronavirus outbreak anywhere in the world.)