Fed whistleblower secretly recorded 46 hours of regulatory capture inside Goldman Sachs

Carmen Segarra is a former FTC regulator who joined the fed after the financial crisis to help rescue the banking system -- but she was so shocked by the naked regulatory capture on display that she ended up buying a covert recorder from a "spy shop" and used it to secretly record her colleagues letting Goldman Sachs get away with pretty much anything it wanted to do.Segarra has an impressive bio -- speaks four language, degrees from Cornell, Harvard and Columbia, worked as a compliance officer at some of the world's biggest banks. She joined the Fed in the wake of the 2009 Report on Systemic Risk and Bank Supervision, a shocking and frank assessment by the Fed itself, documenting its deference to and regulatory capture by the banks it was supposed to be regulating, a deference and capture that allowed the subprime crisis to unfold under its own nose.
The Fed had vowed to reform this culture, and Segarra was supposed to be part of that mission. But once she reported for work at the Fed department at Goldman Sachs (Fed regulators actually work at desks inside the banks they're regulating), she discovered a culture rotten with cowardice and capture, where her boss's idea of a really stern rebuke for lying in official filings was to mildly mention that there appeared to be some irregularities in the compliance regime, then trailing off ineffectually.
We know this because of the recordings, which were edited into a documentary by This American Life that aired yesterday. It's an absolutely riveting and essential hour of audio (MP3), and the accompanying package by Pro Publica is likewise essential reading.

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