Could the AG Eric Holder resignation anything to do with this?

Tim Geithner: "I have never been a regulator."

Technically true. At the Fed he had been a 'supervisor', but one with the power to regulate the banks under their purview -- a power he found it better not to exercise with any vigor. That attitude certainly paid off well for him. For the nation - not so much.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

the Fed is not appointed by Govt to regulate Wall St, but vice versa

keep to the Fen Causeway

I found it to be completely incredible. For somebody to tell me that credibility is about perception as opposed to reality? I mean, I come from the world of legal and compliance, we deal with hard evidence. It's like, we don't deal with, you know, perceptions.

I come from that world too, and she's missed the obvious element.  You only find that incredible if you've never worked in a politically sensitive area.

In my world, people bang on about "optics" all the time.

Optics are total fucking bullshit, of course.  I try to explain this a fair bit.  "Barring some horrendous scandal, the optics mean fuck all in this election.  You know why So-and-So's going to win?  Because s/he hasn't screwed up too badly, and s/he's not a (Dem/Rep).  That's how elections work in this scenario."

Similarly, "Why does anybody give a shit about the optics here?  Folks have made up their minds on that anyway.  Just roll with it.  Fuck'em."

Nothing pisses me off quite like "optics".  People who care about optics are gutless trash who don't know how anything works.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Jake's right, it's not about her. The recordings tell the story, how the great crash of 2008 has not changed the culture one jot or iota.

She is not especially memorable as a personality, similar to Snowden that way.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

If you missed our coverage in 2012 of the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center where Wall Street sleuths from those serially charged firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan dunk donuts alongside New York's finest in a $150 million spy center, keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their own Wall Street employees as well as innocent pedestrians, then you may not fully appreciate why Carmen Segarra has been celebrated all weekend for her temerity in taping her boss and colleagues at the New York Fed, as well as employees inside the cloistered bowels of Goldman Sachs.

While Wall Street was spying on everyone else in lower Manhattan in a high tech center funded by the taxpayer, Segarra strolled over to a Spy Store, plunked down a modest sum and walked out with a tiny tape recorder. She then proceeded to capture the essence of the quintessential captured regulators who didn't see the 2008 crash coming and won't see the next one coming either - because their job is not to see too much. (We called the Spy Store on Saturday to ask if they had experienced an upsurge in sales of the tiny recorder. We were informed that sales were brisk but not unusual.)

Segarra is a lawyer and former bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street's key regulators, who charged in a lawsuit filed in October 2013 that she was told to change her negative examination of Goldman Sachs by colleagues, who also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. According to her lawsuit, when she refused to alter her findings, she was terminated in retaliation and escorted from the Fed premises.