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Three U.S. Senators proposed a bill on Tuesday that would prevent the nation’s most powerful banking executives from simultaneously running the very institutions intended to keep them playing by the rules, with one of the bill’s sponsors saying that JP Morgan’s recent billions in losses are indicative of “a fox guarding a hen house.”
Proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and backed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Mark Begich (D-AK), The Federal Reserve Independence Act (PDF) would prohibit the leaders of risk-taking firms from simultaneously sitting on a Federal Reserve board, or being employed by one. The bill would also keep the nation’s top bankers from selecting Fed board members, and block those members from owning stock in companies they regulate or supervise.
While it certainly sounds like a hot-button issue fraught with Capitol Hill controversy, the proposal is actually a very modest one that implements a Recommendation made last year by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
“In other words, the people ‘regulating’ the banks are the exact same people who are being ‘regulated,’” Sanders said in a document published to his website (PDF)
( ) “If this is not a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse, I don’t know what is.” ( )