Feeding at the slops trough

This one is rich: turns out that a federal bank examiner from an entity called the ‘Office of Thrift Supervision’—is this from a Dickens novel or The Washington Post?—conspired last May with the failed IndyMac Bank to falsify its financial records. No surprise there, the fox guarding the chicken coop as usual.


[FDIC and OTS officials happily chainsaw oversight regulations with three top banker lobbyists--this is not a joke! They were boasting about it--see names of the guilty below]

But it gets better: the now-fired examiner, one Darrel Dochow, who incidentally also watched carefully over the books of Washington Mutual, Countrywide and Downey Savings & Loan as they spectacularly tanked, was still a thriving OTS bureaucrat after an equally brilliant earlier performance. Dochow was found to have ‘delayed and impeded proper regulation’ in the notorious Keating S&L scandal of the 1980s and ‘90s, the same one John McCain distinguished himself in.

So this genius Dochow was paid $230,000 a year to supervise banks after having proven himself totally incompetent at it. I guess that would be called ‘personal responsibility’ in the current lexicon.

In any case he got the message and oiled the regulatory wheels once again so that a bank could make off with billions of other people’s money. Why not? After all, we almost elected another guy president of the entire country who was mixed up in the same greasy machinery.

[Photo caption: Two regulators, John Reich (then FDIC, later OTS) and James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision (with chainsaw) celebrates with James McLaughlin, American Bankers Association; Harry Doherty, America's Community Bankers; and Ken Guenther, Independent Community Bankers of America.]