While it's been a hectic week, I wanted to resume blogging long enough to update a couple of recent posts with comments made by readers via email. The first concerned last week's post on Liz Warren's rabid rapid ascent into the stratosphere of the Senate. I closed that post by expressing the hope that Barney Frank's push to fill John Carey's vacant Senate seat would be successful so that, albeit for a short time, we could have both Lizzie Borden Warren and Barney ("Thufferin Thuccotash") Frank going hog wild in tandem on pro-consumer, BIG GOVERNMENT EXPANSION proposals that would have absolutely no chance of surviving a Senate filibuster, much less making it through a Republican-dominated House, but would contain as much moon battery and tom foolery as any blogger might wish for in his or her fondest blog-fodder dreams. Not being glued to Bay State political nuances, I had failed to notice that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had spurned Barney's advances and instead chosen Patrick's very own former chief of staff to fill the interim Senate seat. Out of power, out of mind. I guess we'll have to make do with playing Wack-a-Wack-Job with Liz for the foreseeable future.
As a consolation prize, Barney gets to say "I'm not a real Senator, but I play one on stage."
Another reader, an experienced bank lawyer who has taken on the OTS and OCC from time-to-time, gave me a couple of intriguing comments about my most recent post, which discussed the FDIC's lawsuit against former officers and directors of the failed Charter Bank of New Mexico. I wondered why, after all the writedowns of CRE loans by the OTS and all of the resultant losses tied to those loans that could have been alleged by the FDIC, the FDIC focused instead on a smaller amount of losses caused by a subprime mortgage lending unit.
In the wake of the NLRB holding, and the simple fact that the OTS was running without a properly appointed director for several years, from March 2009 until the 2011 handover and in violation of the Vacancies Reform Act, wouldn’t you limit your case to the non-OTS determined issues too?
The Appointment of the Receiver in January 2010 was, perhaps, an illegal act in itself.
Fun food for thought.
Fun food for thought, indeed, although I haven't had the time--and no one is paying me--to think about it. Perhaps legal counsel for the former officers and directors of Charter Bank will have both the time and the financial incentive.
