The Federal Reserve deserves part — but not all — of the responsibility for lax financial services regulation that played a part in the credit crisis, a Chicago Fed official said Thursday.
"The Federal Reserve, for reasons that escape many of us, has been singled out I would say for a lot of the criticism of lax regulation," said Carl Tannenbaum, vice president of the risk specialist division for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in a speech in Washington. His remarks came the same day as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified at his confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill.
"I will concede certainly, and I'm sure the chairman would as well, that we learned a lot about what was going on in banks and our approach to them," to effectively improve supervision, Tannenbaum said.
But other regulatory bodies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., were similarly in charge of supervising the complicated financial institutions, he said.
"It is a shared responsibility. To the degree that it's done well, it's a shared experience. And to the degree that it doesn't go so well, I think that's also something that we all need to be accountable for."
