A Federal agency that was supposed to function as a regulatory watchdog, didn't.
Not much news there, huh?
Well, maybe not for you but for the Washington Post and other until-lately-Bush-propaganda-outlets, this has come as profoundly unsettling information. Really.
A senior federal banking regulator approved a plan by IndyMac Bank to exaggerate its financial health in a May federal filing, allowing the California company to avoid regulatory restrictions only two months before it collapsed, a federal inquiry has found.
The same regulatory agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, allowed similar legerdemain by other banks, according to a letter sent yesterday to members of Congress by the Treasury Department's inspector general, Eric Thorson. The letter did not provide details about the other incidents.
The finding that OTS on several occasions "blessed a fiction," in the words of one congressional staffer, renews questions about the agency's relationship with the companies it regulates and about its complicity in the collapse this year of several of the nation's largest thrifts, including Washington Mutual and Countrywide Financial.
Yes, yes. Scandalous. I'm *yawn* trying to keep my outrage under control. A Bush agency that didn't do its job and colluded with the banks in the fraud at the heart of the mortgage crisis? Terrible. Terrible. We're all, um, shocked. Really.
Or were two years ago when we figured out what was happening. Still, since it's obviously new to the WaPo's non-newsreading reporters who are just beginning to get their feet wet writing stories for the first time in their tender careers that aren't Bush Propaganda Stenography, and since we'd like to encourage them to, you know, keep it up, we'll do our best to pretend that we're as surprised as they are at this dastardly turn of events and try to forget that we were begging them to investigate the situation back in ought-five but they weren't, like, interested, man, because the same people who pulled the scam were telling them there was no scam.
And they believed it.
So much for the virtue of skepticism.
So here goes:
WHAT A STORY! THE WASHINGTON POST RIPS THE VEIL FROM THE BUSH COVER-UP OF THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN!
BUSH REGULATORY AGENCY CONSPIRED TO HELP BANKS HIDE THEIR FAILING HEALTH BY FALSIFYING BANK RECORDS!
I AM OUTRAGED!!!!!!
Nice work guys, you really nailed that one.
(Are they buying it?)
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