Fannie Mae Preferred S (FNMAS)

[44centsAKAchoccake]

More more from the New Yorker


Warren effectively co-opted Fine and his members as allies against Wall Street. As the Dodd-Frank bill made its way through Congress, in 2010, Fine’s willingness to tolerate it was crucial. With Warren’s blessing, Barney Frank, who sponsored the bill in the House, negotiated a deal with Fine that allowed community banks to be examined by their current regulators rather than by Warren’s new agency. “They were the ones with the clout, and that’s why I had to make a deal with Cam,” Frank told me. Warren signed off on it. “She was willing to do what she had to do as long as it didn’t give away substance,” Frank said. “Every time we came to one of those things where, to save the great bulk of the bill, we had to make some kind of concession, she understood it and was very helpful in selling it.”


Geithner, long pilloried as doing the bidding of bankers, couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of Warren and Frank’s accommodation with Fine. “The smaller community banks, with members in every congressional district, got themselves largely carved out of the new consumer agency’s direct supervision, despite our resistance,” he wrote in his memoir. But, in exchange for the concession, Fine promised Frank that he wouldn’t oppose the agency, a position that Frank told me secured the support of many wavering centrist Democrats and helped insure the bill’s passage.