Banking Regulator Played Advocate Over Enforcer

But critics said the agency had neglected its obligation to police the thrift industry and instead became more of a consultant.

"What you had here is a regulatory motif that was too accommodating to private-sector interests," said Jim Leach, a former Republican lawmaker who led what was then the House Banking Committee and now lectures in public affairs at Princeton University. "In this case, the end result is chaos for the industry, their customers and the national interest."

Warning Signs Ignored

On a hot Friday afternoon in June 2001, federal regulators swept into the suburban Chicago offices of Superior Bank and told stunned employees that it had been closed by OTS.

Superior was the largest thrift to fail since the savings and loans crisis in the early 1990s. Its demise foreshadowed the current upheaval. The company had made billions of dollars in mortgage loans to customers with credit problems but boosted profits instead of setting aside enough revenue to cover the eventual losses.

OTS regulators had not questioned the company's assurances about the quality of its loans. They had not required Superior to set aside more money. Even after the problems were identified, several federal investigators concluded that regulators had continued to rely on the company's promises rather than forcing it to take action.

"The whole Superior episode should have served as a warning," Ellen Seidman, then-director of OTS, said in a recent interview. Seidman acknowledged that she should have acted faster and more forcefully to address Superior's problems. Seidman, a Democrat, left her post shortly after the Bush administration began and had little role in revising the agency's approach.

Although the failure and disappearance of Superior triggered minor reforms, OTS did not learn the broader lesson. Thrifts were expanding into high-risk mortgage lending, but OTS was not requiring stronger safeguards.

John Reich, who has been OTS director since 2005, and Polakoff, his deputy, were well positioned to have learned the lesson. At the time of Superior's difficulties, Reich was one of the leaders of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Polakoff ran FDIC's Chicago office. Indeed, Polakoff's office recognized Superior's problems before OTS and pushed for increased scrutiny of Superior's bookkeeping.

In testimony before Congress in the fall of 2001, Reich listed what he considered the lessons of Superior's failure. Among them, he said, "we must see to it that institutions engaging in risky lending . . . hold sufficient capital to protect against sudden insolvency."

But instead of increasing oversight, OTS shrank dramatically over the next four years.

Reducing Regulation

In the summer of 2003, leaders of the four federal agencies that oversee the banking industry gathered to highlight the Bush administration's commitment to reducing regulation. They posed for photographers behind a stack of papers wrapped in red tape. The others held garden shears. Gilleran, who succeeded Seidman as OTS director in late 2001, hefted a chain saw.

Gilleran was an impassioned advocate of deregulation. He cut a quarter of the agency's 1,200 employees between 2001 and 2004, even though the value of loans and other assets of the firms regulated by OTS increased by half over the same period. The result was a mismatch between a short-handed agency and a burgeoning thrift industry.