Eleven years ago this week - in fact, during the first days of the Obama administration - I offered a Laquedem Plan for how the federal government should deal with the bankers whose carelessness, fecklessness, and recklessness threatened to bring down the banking system and, with it, the nation's economy. I proposed that the government should buy up the bad assets of the major banks and then make the bad bankers leave their sinecures and work for the banks with the bad loans that they had created - the "Kick the bad bankers out on their assets" plan.
A year and a half later I went farther, and proposed that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation should treat the bad bankers the same way that life insurance companies treat those with serious and chronic health problems: declare them to be uninsurable, or, more exactly, declare that any bank that engaged any of the bad bankers to be an officer or director would not be eligible for FDIC insurance. The FDIC, I thought, should start a "no-fly" list of its own to protect our nation's financial institutions. As far as I know it didn't happen under the Obama administration.
You may recall the interchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren and John Stumpf, then the chief executive officer of Wells Fargo, when he was testifying before (read: haled before) a Senate committee about his bank's having created millions of fake bank accounts and issued millions of bogus credit cards so that account representatives and mid-level officers could meet their sales targets. Mr. Stumpf lost the debate and shortly afterward, retired -- very gently and lucratively -- from Wells Fargo. That was about all that happened to him . . . until this week. Much as I disagree with President Trump, I was delighted to read today that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has obtained Mr. Stumpf's agreement to pay $17.5 million to the Treasury and to never, ever work in any financial institution again - think of him as the Pete Rose of the banking world.
My delight in the OCC's expelling Mr. Stumpf from civilized financial society is tempered, however, by the fact that he got in trouble not for running his bank into the ground but for using unsavory methods to make $billions for the shareholders. I suppose that makes him a good bad banker. For its next expulsions the OCC should select the bankers who lost billions - the bad bad bankers.