How Crazy Are the Democrats? This Crazy

Joe Biden has nominated Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. It is an important position. According to the Comptroller’s web site:

The OCC charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. The OCC is an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

So who is Ms. Omarova, whom Joe Biden wants to “charter, regulate and supervise all national banks”? She is not a banker, but a professor at Cornell Law School. Sadly, these days being a law school professor is rarely a positive recommendation. (Sorry, Glenn and Bill.) The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote about the Omarova nomination today:

She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.

You can’t make this stuff up. And she still yearns for the USSR, which you can get away with as a law professor–although, to be fair, she also has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, which might be a worse black mark:

Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.

“Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’” she tweeted in 2019.

Just the person we want regulating our banking system! To which she applies views consistent with her Lenin Scholarship:

Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. …

In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.”

All right then! Has anyone told Ms. Omarova that the Soviet Union lost the cold war, and fell apart? I suppose she knows that, having departed the USSR in 1991 when it collapsed, for what are undoubtedly greener pastures. But, living a cushy academic life in the U.S., she is not only free to advocate for Leninist banking policies, she can actually be appointed to regulate American banks! Is this a great country, or what?

The woman, to be blunt, is an idiot:

Ms. Omarova believes capital and credit should be directed by an unaccountable bureaucracy and intelligentsia. She has recommended a “National Investment Authority,” with members overseen by an advisory board of academics, to finance a “big and bold” climate agenda. Sounds like the green infrastructure bank the Senate rejected.

She’d also like a politically and structurally independent “Public Interest Council” of “highly paid” academics with broad subpoena power to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed. The Council, she explained, would not be subject to the “constraints and requirements of the administrative process.” Ivy League professors know best.

More “highly paid” academics who are not subject to “constraints and requirements”–just what we need!

Is this some kind of joke? One is tempted to think so, but sadly, it isn’t. The Democratic Party really has descended to the level of insanity where it wants to import Soviet ideas into the American banking system. Because they have been so successful, presumably. It will be interesting to see how many Senate Democrats vote against confirming a Lenin Scholarship winner to regulate American banking.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses