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Elizabeth Warren again overstepping her mandate

By Anonymous

I've criticized the Elizabeth Warren-led TARP Oversight Panel for overstepping its mandate before, but this is just ridiculous: the Oversight Panel has invited, among others, Sweden's minister for fiscal and financial affairs during its 1992 banking crisis, Bo Lundgren, to testify at a hearing on past government responses to banking crises.

The Oversight Panel has no policymaking function whatsoever. Its mandate is (obviously) oversight of existing policy. It's wildly inappropriate for the Oversight Panel to be commenting on prospective banking policy. The lessons to be learned from Sweden's approach, or from the Resolution Trust Corporation, are in no way relevant to the Oversight Panel's statutory mandate.

I thought Elizabeth Warren was a good selection for the Chair of the Oversight Panel, because I thought she would provide vigorous oversight, and would be effective in preventing waste/fraud in the allocation of TARP funds. But it's increasingly clear that Warren just wants to use the Oversight Panel to advance her own personal policy agenda. Warren is an excellent bankruptcy scholar, but she is most certainly not a banking/financial markets expert.

Full post as published by Economics of Contempt on March 18, 2009 (boomark / email).