A regulator scorned? Why Sheila Bair’s gender matters
“[W]e were being ignored, and we had something to bring to the table,” Joe Nocera quotes the former head of the FDIC in the New York Times Magazine. Bair was one of the few people at the top levels of government to push for more restrictions on investment banks and one of the very few to say that more banks should be allowed to fail. It wasn’t just that the FDIC was a smaller agency than most, or that Bair was a Republican. The reason Sheila Bair got no traction for her sensible views was often due, by all appearances, to the fact that she’s a woman. (more…)