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Senate panel will grill WaMu regulators

Friday, April 9, 2010, 10:57am PDT
by Kirsten Grind

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2010/04/05/daily46.html?surround=lfn

The congressional committee that will question former Washington Mutual executives April 13 in Washington, D.C., has also scheduled a hearing examining the actions of the Seattle bank’s federal regulators, according to information released Friday.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will question the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) about WaMu’s oversight and the events leading up to its Sept. 25, 2008, seizure and sale to JPMorgan Chase.

A witness list for the hearing, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Eastern (6:30 a.m. Pacific) on April 16, will be released on April 12, according to the subcommittee.

The hearing will follow the April 13 session, in which the committee will take testimony from top Washington Mutual executives. That hearing is scheduled to begin 9:30 a.m. Eastern (6:30 a.m. Pacific).

In a statement released Friday, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, said the goals of the panel are to construct a public record of facts about what happened, to inform ongoing legislative debate about financial reform and “to provide a foundation for building better defenses to protect Main Street from the excesses of Wall Street.”

“The recent financial crisis was not a natural disaster; it was a man-made economic assault. People did it. Extreme greed was the driving force. And it will happen again unless we change the rules,” Levin said in the statement.

The Puget Sound Business Journal will be covering the hearings live in Washington, DC next week.