Press Releases
Patrick McHenry’s Credibility Problem on Banking Crisis Just Got Worse
Bloomberg reports that Republican House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry was thrown a high-dollar fundraiser by Signature Bank at their offices just 10 days before the bank’s collapse. The revelation comes as Chairman McHenry claims his committee will “get to the bottom” of the rash of recent failures of midsize banks which experts say stem from a key Trump-Republican rollback of Dodd-Frank banking safeguards in 2018 that McHenry helped author. McHenry’s credibility crisis continues to worsen after calling the 2018 regulatory rollback a “win for consumers” and an “important first step to undo Dodd Frank.” McHenry declared he was “proud to have played an active role in drafting this bill” as he took substantial sums of money from the financial industry that lobbied to undo Dodd-Frank reforms – including Signature Bank.
While Chairman McHenry’s staff claims donations from the Signature Bank fundraiser event “won’t be processed”, an Accountable.US review found Signature employees and executives have donated at least $400,000 in career contributions to McHenry. In recent days, McHenry has doubled-down on his view that the Dodd-Frank deregulations were appropriate and desperately deflected blame to Twitter for “fuel[ing]” the bank runs.
Chairman McHenry won’t need to look very far to find who’s responsible for the worsening banking crisis. McHenry was a lead architect of the law that gutted regulatory safeguards that likely could have kept midsize banks from falling like dominos.
Less financial industry oversight leads to more risky and greedy behavior with other people’s money, and it predictably caught up with a growing list of banks. The Chairman has refused to take any responsibility for doing the bidding of his major financial industry donors that lobbied for deregulation to the detriment of the stability of the financial system. Even as banks were on the cusp of collapse, McHenry was busy glad-handing and schmoozing with executives of one of the failing banks at a ritzy fundraiser in his honor. Chairman McHenry is the least credible person in Congress to ‘get to the bottom’ of what happened, yet he still plans to put on a big show next week – likely to deflect blame from Republicans in Congress and double down on their plans to recklessly gut consumer financial protections even further.”
