During her interview on CNN, Elizabeth Warren got to spend a little less time dealing with inane knee-jerk responses from anchors, and a little more time explaining the crux of the issue: that the Treasury Department isn’t tracking its bailout spending.
Some excerpts:
This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t some strange thing we’re asking for. If you’re gonna take that much money from American taxpayers, you’ve gotta have the banks tell what they’re going to do with it. We have to have some way of telling if its working. and if you don’t have accountability, if you don’t have metrics in place, you’re really just kind of handing it out there and hoping for the best.
And:
Treasury did not say: tell us what you’re going to do with the money. Tell us how you used it. That just hasn’t happened. There’s no basic accountability in the system.
Warren also laid out the intriguing idea of establishing a product safety commission for financial products, just as we have for toasters, car seats, and other consumer products.
And she ended with an Eliot Ness-like pledge to keep up the fight. Asked by CNN’s Tony Harris whether she’d continue to try to track the bailout spending, she replied, with brio: “You bet!”
Here’s the whole thing: