A full inspector general report published this week showed that The Federal Reserve Board of New York pushed back against oversight claims made last year about its supposed interagency “London Whale” failures.
But one of the top Fed officials who defended the institution was aware of widespread problems her own examiners were encountering from their bosses by early 2012.
Sarah Dahlgren, the regulator’s head of supervision, and Thomas Baxter, its general counsel, accused the inspector general of reading history backwards. The internal probe, which was first released in October, claimed that the Fed had “effectively identified risks” with the bank’s Central Investment Office years before the infamous multibillion dollar 2012 trading loss, but did not discuss the matter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency like it previously said it would in a supervisory letter. Dahlgren and Baxter said the investigation “inaccurately reflects” cooperation between the New York Fed and the OCC.
But leaked audio tapes recorded by a former Fed official and a separate investigation conducted by independent journalists showed that the Fed had a swarm of its own problems concerning the London Whale, and that Dahlgren had been well aware of them by January 2012–right before JPMorgan’s CIO increased the size of its synthetic credit portfolio from $51 billion to $157 billion.
In an article published last fall, ProPublica found that, almost exactly three years ago, Fed overseers “embedded at JPMorgan complained about being blocked from doing their jobs.” One manager said the officials leading the JPMorgan team were stonewalling oversight in a manner that “grinds everything to a halt.” Dahlgren was recorded saying that the problem goes beyond one team of examiners.
“This is obviously an issue that has come up, and I’ve heard, on the GE [Capital] team last week, too, and the JPM [JPMorgan] team, this issue is one that is alive,” Dahlgren said. She did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
The inspector general report she responded to mostly bemoaned technical errors. It said that a 2011 personnel change and “many supervisory demands and a lack of supervisory resources during and after the financial crisis” were to blame for the Fed’s London Whale failures. It also noted that “weakness in controls around supervisory planning” were also to blame.
The watchdog added, however, that it could not definitively say if joint Fed-OCC investigations “would have resulted in an examination team detecting the specific control weaknesses” that fueled the London Whale losses.
Nonetheless, it said the New York Fed should have communicated with the OCC in a manner “consistent with the expectations described” in the aforementioned supervisory letter.
“As a result, there was a missed opportunity for the consolidated supervisor and the primary supervisor to discuss risks related to the CIO and to consider how to deploy the agencies’ collective resources most effectively,” the investigation found.
In their letter detailing “factual concerns,” Dahlgren and Baxter blast the report and say, among other things, that the New York Fed “never knew there were trading irregularities in the CIO.”
The pair do not note, however, that at least one of them was also aware of in-house practices that were fueling this ignorance.
Parts of the report remain confidential, and the redacted investigation was only released after journalists filed Freedom of Information Requests.
Read the full inspector general report here.
