Michael Lewis at Bloomberg View reports on a This American Life story on 46 hours of tapes secretly recorded by a Fed employee embedded at Goldman Sachs. An excerpt from Lewis's story:
* * * In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement — to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."
* * *
You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.