Washington - At a Senate Banking Committee hearing today, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), member of the Senate Banking Committee, hammered federal regulators, including the head of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) which is responsible for regulating banks, for failure to fully implement Wall Street Reform and prevent the trades that led to the recent huge losses at JP Morgan.

Click here for the video of Senator Menendez's question and answer session with Curry from today's hearing.

A transcript of select parts of this Q&A is below:

SENATOR MENENDEZ: Mr. Curry, I want to ask you about JP Morgan losing $2 billion and possibly more. Since the OCC, who is a primary regulator of JP Morgan and the OCC has a well-deserved reputation for being too cozy with the banks that it regulates, and I know that you just got to your new position so you have an opportunity here to decide what the OCC does in the future.

SENATOR MENENDEZ (at time code 00:00:34): What I don't want to see is a repeat of 2008. I know that you know a free market is essential to our very economic vitality, but there's a difference between a free market and free-for-all market. And in 2008 what we obviously came to the conclusion of was the consequences of a free-for-all market where the decisions of large financial institutions became the collective risk of an entire country even though they weren't part of making those investments and other decisions and then all of us had to pay.

SENATOR MENENDEZ (at time code 00:01:52): So, I know you just got to this position and I am certainly not blaming you personally for this, but I just have a yes or no question: did the OCC screw up in allowing these JP Morgan trades to happen?

TOM CURRY, OCC: Senator, we're going to critically look at that question, that's part of my goal in reviewing what happened at JP Morgan Chase - it's not just to see what the bank itself did wrong, but also how we can improve our supervisory processes at the OCC. So, it will be a critical self-review as part of this process.

SENATOR MENENDEZ (at time code 00:03:34): Shouldn't the sheer size of these trades have been a huge red flag for the OCC?

TOM CURRY: That is an issue,the concentrated nature of the trading and the liquidity of it are red flags that are clearly apparent now.

SENATOR MENENDEZ: (at time code 00:04:00) I think that every regulator here responsible for implementing the law should know if huge trading losses like this happen at banks after we established the Volcker rule, and capital rules have been written and implemented, then I think the blood will be on all of your hands if the London Whale ultimately goes belly up next time.

Because in this case, I know that the comment is "well they can absorb the two or four billion dollars", whatever it ends up being, but what if you had through these trades... what's to stop them from losing multiples of that - billions more the next time. Or even more significantly, a less-well capitalized bank from losses that could bring it down? I just don't see where the circuit breakers are here. I don't see where the ability to ensure that in fact that type of decision making doesn't become the collective risk of all of us again in this country. And I don't think the American people and certainly this Senator are willing to go down that road again. And I don't know what it takes to get everybody to understand that we are serious in purpose here to ensure that the law is fully implemented.

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