LEVER TIME: She Was Blocked for Being Right on Banks

In the new episode of our weekly podcast Lever Time, we reached out to two people who know what’s really going on in the banking system, and asked them what can be done to prevent these kinds of emergencies from happening: Cornell Law School Professor Saule Omarova and Matt Stoller, an analyst and researcher who writes frequently about financial regulation.

If Omarova’s name sounds a bit familiar, that’s because she was nominated by President Joe Biden to be one of the federal government’s top bank regulators, but her nomination was blocked in the U.S. Senate by Republicans and a group of corporate Democrats. They opposed her because she was promising very tough bank regulations — which might have helped prevent the current bank crisis.

In their discussion, David Sirota and Julia Rock talked to Omarova and Stoller about the bank industry’s lobbying and deregulation that led to this crisis — and what can be done to move us away from neverending financial panics.

A rough transcript of the episode is available here.

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