Let The (Blame) Games Begin
Bank Lawyer’s Blog:
Friday afternoon’s seizure of IndyMac Bank commenced an immediate flurry of finger-pointing that will likely continue for some time. As lawyer Gerry Comizio noted in a recent American Banker article on the event (paid subscription required), "With a failure of this size there’s bound to be a lot of finger-pointing." Count on it.
Right out of the gate, the OTS put the blame squarely on Chuck Schumer’s pointed little head, and offered up a fact sheet to show that the run on the core deposits of IndyMac that led to the liquidity crisis that was the immediate cause of the thrift’s failure commenced immediately following Schumer’s public leaking of his letter to the regulators about IndyMac. It will be hard to argue that Schumer’s public statements and the ensuing run on the bank were not the immediate cause of the failure.
As to how IndyMac got to the point where…