washington abandoned main street while rescuing wall street. orauth and former inspector general neil baroski is our guest. good morning to you. good morning. let s start at the beginning of the book followed by the name of herb allison who is a big shot in the world of finance and he was down in washington and he pretty much threatened you that you were doing too good of a job keeping tabs on our money. essentially, what he told me and this is really endemic to what s wrong with washington and what s so broken within our regulatory system and indicative of how much wall street has really taken over and it s shocking how much they ve taken over washington and our economy and what alisyn told me was to warn me that because of my tone, the way i was being very critical of the administration, critical of wall street, i was doing real harm to myself in my ability to go get a job and visit that pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow. it s like listen, you have to think about you
out, they were out to prop up the fat cats on wall street. and the big banks while mom and pop on main street pretty much got screwed. and every critical juncture when an opportunity and a decision was made to make a choice, the choice was to help the banks whether it was with the housing program, whether it was with shovelling money into the banks without any conditions or strings attached, time and time again to put the interest of the banks over the thing about this tarp is like making sausage, you don t want to see how it s done and you were revealing where the money was going and how it just was not there. and tim geithner who at one point you felt was going to throttle you, you had this exchange. here s a quote from the book. neil, tim geithner says to you, i have been the most blanking, transparent secretary of the treasury in this country since higher bleep in history. nobody has made the banks disclose the type of blank that i made them disclose after the stress test. no
threatening you. unless you back off, you re toast. the other part of that, if i could change my tone and be more upbeat and positive, good things could happen to me including maybe a judgeship or some other presidential appointment. it was disturbing and i think most disturbing because that s the reality in washington right now for so many of the regulators. if they play ball and don t push too hard on the banks, no worries, you know, big pot of gold but you push back and you could do yourself real harm. you were brought in to be the eyes and ears, inspector general to make sure on behalf of congress to make sure the money in tarp was being spent correctly. you re a life long democrat and you supported and donated to barack obama and yet, it was during the bush years that you were asked to come in, right? yeah, it was a straight appointment, i had a background prosecuting securities fraud and started a mortgage fraud unit in the southern district of new york where he was a prose