From a piece I wrote (behind paywall but probably available soon on Lexis):
Have you heard about the government agency led by a guy holding a chainsaw as he promises dramatic cuts in regulation?
Think it’s a story about Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency? It’s also about James Gilleran, leader of the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), who did the same thing years earlier. What makes the OTS story particularly useful today is that we know what Gilleran’s chainsaw led us to: the Great Recession.
That’s in part because the OTS not only didn’t stop lenders it regulated from making the loans that brought down the economy, it even said they could ignore state laws preventing predatory lending. Many of those lenders failed during the Great Recession, including former household names like Washington Mutual, IndyMac, and Countrywide.
The rest of the piece is about the attempts to gut the CFPB and the court response. Prentiss Cox of Minnesota reminded me of the story about Gilleran.
