by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Yesterday, the Big Law firm Cleary Gottlieb released its so-called “independent review” of charges of sexual harassment at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Although no employee is charging Martin Gruenberg, the Chair of the FDIC, with sexual harassment, Cleary Gottlieb seems to go out of its way to paint Gruenberg in a negative light in the report – 108 times in fact.
Gruenberg held the deciding vote at the FDIC last July when the bank regulator approved moving forward with proposed new rules to significantly raise the capital levels at the megabanks on Wall Street, particularly those holding trillions of dollars in derivatives off their balance sheet. These include the same banks that secretly received $16 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to July 2010 because they were undercapitalized and teetering on insolvency, as well as receiving billions of dollars in equity infusions from the U.S. taxpayer. They also include the same banks that received trillions of dollars in emergency repo loan bailouts in the last quarter of 2019 and more bailouts during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.