Maxine Waters hauled seven Wall Street bank chiefs to a hearing that had all the elements of a show trial: contrite executives, lecturing lawmakers and TV cameras to magnify every exchange. Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson even showed up.
Yet the theatrics were secondary to changes the House Financial Services Committee chairwoman won even before the hearing began -- Bank of America Corp. raised its minimum wage, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. set minority hiring goals and JPMorgan Chase & Co. vowed to stop financing private prisons. The policy wins show how Waters plans to wield power in a divided Congress as she oversees the banking industry and joins other Democrats in probing President Donald Trump’s finances.
“They simply understand that it’s a new day and a new way,” Waters said of the executives in an interview. “I am the first African-American and first woman chair. They know that I have expectations.” She said she doesn’t want banks coming to her pushing deregulation. She wants to hear about what they’re doing differently, whether it’s a diversity program, a new product or some other innovation.
More Hearings
And Waters is planning to put even more CEOs in the hot seat. The committee is preparing a hearing with executives from U.S. regional lenders, she says. Another with executives from foreign banks is also on the table, she said. The format for those sessions is likely to follow the April 10 hearing where JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon and other Wall Street bosses answered questions for most of the day.
Waters, a California Democrat, has also used her committee post to scrutinize Trump, partnering with fellow committee chairs Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings. She has subpoenaed Trump’s banking records as a part of a wide-ranging investigation of both his finances and Russian money-laundering, provoking criticism from her committee’s Republicans as well as the president, who has sued to halt some of the subpoenas.
The committee’s agenda is pleasing progressives who have demanded more crackdowns on Wall Street.
“Waters gets the oversight function of Congress in a way that few Democratic chairs do,’’ said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a Washington group that has been pushing the new House majority to scrutinize banks and other corporations. “She understands the power -- and the enormous potential -- of convening the nation’s bankers, the media and members of Congress.’’
Genuine Oversight
Committee member Katie Porter, a California Democrat elected last year, said the panel’s use of hearings helps provide genuine oversight of the financial services industry and serves to “focus the minds” of industry executives.
“I think other executives should take note of what’s going on in these hearings and they should reflect before a hearing on what they need to be doing -- and how they need to be good corporate citizens,” Porter, a law professor and consumer rights advocate, said in an interview.
The committee is stocked with some of the most liberal and outspoken first-term Democrats, including Porter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It drew attention a few weeks before the April 10 hearing with a withering examination of Wells Fargo & Co. head Tim Sloan, who had been dealing with the fallout of years of scandal at the bank. He resigned a short time later.