We’re late to this, but it looks like Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight panel for the TARP funds, is upping the ante.
After several months of raising the alarm about the Treasury Department’s failure to attach strings to the bailout funds, to little apparent effect, Warren will issue a hard-hitting report this week that broadly indicts the Obama administration’s approach to the financial crisis, reported the British paper The Observer over the weekend.
The report will call for top execs at several major banks, including Citigroup and AIG, to be fired, and for shareholders in those institutions to be wiped out.
“The very notion that anyone would infuse money into a financially troubled entity without demanding changes in management is preposterous,” Warren told the paper in an interview. “When are they going to say, enough?”
As we said, this is hardly the first time that Warren has sharply criticized the government’s approach to the bailout, and it’s unclear whether this latest round will prove more effective than the previous ones. But until Warren gets put in a position with some actual executive power, it’s hard to know what more she can do.
Now there’s a thought…