Elizabeth Warren Carves Up Fed Honcho in Senate Hearing: ‘Our Financial System Will Be Safer When You Are Gone’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) minced no words during Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing, telling Federal Reserve Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles that United States finances would be better without him.

“‎Your term as chair is up in five months and our financial system will be safer when you are gone,” she said during the hearing on the Federal Reserve’s management of the financial system. “I urge President [Joe] Biden to fill your role with someone who will actually keep our financial system safe.”

Warren opened by explaining that a hedge fund called Archegos “imploded after making some very risky bets” last month, leading several banks to suffer huge loses.

She noted that those banks suffered $10 billion in total loses when Archegos collapsed, highlighting Credit Suisse, which took a particularly bad hit of $5.5 billion.

“Some of our biggest banks had loaned Archegos the money to make the bets, even though the hedge fund was managed by a guy who had already been charged with insider trading and banned by regulators from handling clients’ money,” she said, later accusing the Fed of failing to supervise the big banks.

Quarles pushed back on the claim, telling the senator that he “didn’t say to weaken supervision,” but instead “said it was more appropriate to supervise them with other foreign banks of the same size footprint in the United States.”

He added that the losses she mentioned occurred overseas, adding, “we would not have been able to pick them up in [the Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee] or otherwise,” he added.

The two clearly becoming more irritable, Warren noted that foreign losses also impact United States finances.

“Look, we dodged a bullet with the Archegos collapse this time, but what slipped through the net by regulators to contain these losses when things go wrong was relatively small to what could have slipped through,” she added. “It could have been ‎an even bigger failure. ‎And that is because instead of ‎protecting the system you spent your ‎time at the Fed ‎cutting holes in the safety network where you ‎could.”

Watch above, via C-SPAN.