In what could be equivalent to a nuclear bomb on Wall Street, former New York Federal Reserve Examiner Carmen Segarra has released some 46 hours worth of voice recordings, secretly taped with a small recorder on her keychain in 2012, that purportedly show bank regulators going soft and cozy with banking giant Goldman Sachs at a time when the New York Fed was expected to become a stronger regulator after the financial crisis of 2008.
To demonstrate a case in point from the recordings: “We’re looking at a transaction that’s legal but shady,” according to a New York Fed staffer in reference to a proposed Goldman Sachs financial transaction.
The secret recordings – released to both a reporter for ProPublica and radio program This American Life – show an unwillingness among some Fed supervisors to both demand specific information from Goldman about a transaction with Banco Santander and to strongly criticize what Segarra concluded was the lack of an appropriate conflict-of-interest policy at Goldman.
Segarra, who later suited the New York Fed for wrongful termination after her refusal to alter a critical examination of Goldman’s legal and compliance units, said her colleagues were too soft on those kinds of transactions and the banking industry in general.
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