WASHINGTON, D.C.— Dennis Kelleher, President, CEO and Co-founder of Better Markets, issued the following statement in response to the Federal Reserve’s announcement today that the Vice Chair for Supervision will be resigning.

“The Vice Chair said today in his shocking resignation that a ‘dispute’ over his position as Vice Chair for Supervision ‘could be a distraction from our mission,’ but his baseless capitulation to deregulation zealots will in fact destroy that mission quicker and more thoroughly than any dispute over the position. Facilitating that – while destroying the independence of the Vice Chair position and gutting a key post-2008 crash reform – is an abdication of responsibility proved by the Fed’s simultaneous statement that it ‘does not intend to take up any major rulemakings until a vice chair for supervision successor is confirmed.’  The entire mission and mandate of the Vice Chair for Supervision will now likely be a dead letter as a deregulator will undoubtedly be installed in that position.

“Before the catastrophic crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve (Fed) failed to regulate and supervise the nation’s largest banks, which enabled those banks to engage in very dangerous, high-risk conduct that caused the crash and resulted in trillions of dollars in bailouts. The creation of Vice Chair for Supervision position at the Federal Reserve was one of the most important post-crash reforms enacted to prevent that from happening again. It was not just about creating ‘greater responsibility, transparency, and accountability’ for the Fed, as the Vice Chair said in his resignation letter. It was about preventing catastrophic financial crashes that destroy the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans while also making them pay for bailing out Wall Street’s biggest banks. That was the overriding critical mission and mandate of the Vice Chair for Supervision, which went unmentioned by the Vice Chair or Fed today.

“This resignation will go down as a dark day in the history of the Fed, proving again that it cannot be trusted with regulation or supervision. As happened with consumer protection after the last crash, these responsibilities need to be taken away from the Fed and assigned to an agency actually willing to fulfill this important role. Unfortunately, today’s action, along with the broader deregulatory agenda the Trump administration has promised to enact, makes another financial crash, economic catastrophe, and bailouts much more likely, and more likely worse than 2008, which devastated an entire generation of Americans.

“If there was in fact a ‘dispute over the position,’ if in fact the bullies and zealots took action to gut the position by attempting to fire the Vice Chair, a principled legal, public, and political defense of the position and its importance would have served the public much better than just giving up without a fight. The American people need and deserve a strong, independent agency to protect them from the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks, which will inevitably and always prioritize and justify profit maximization even at the expense of financial stability if not properly regulated and supervised.  However, as this action today proves, such an agency also needs to be led by strong, independent, principled, and, when necessary, fearless people willing to stand up and fight for the American people.”