Barney Frank Sat on Board for Collapsed Signature Bank

Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, sat on the board for Signature Bank which collapsed in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) implosion, according to Breitbart News.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last Friday after depositors rushed to withdraw money in fear of its impending fall. It was the 16th largest bank in the country.

The U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced in a joint statement on Sunday the plan to manage the fallout of SVB’s collapse as well as the demise of Signature Bank.

“Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system,” the joint statement read. “This step will ensure that the U.S. banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.”

Frank, who sat on Signature Bank’s board, strongly supported legislation in 2018 that curtailed some of the regulations that his own law Dodd-Frank put in place. “Dodd-Frank imposed additional regulatory safeguards on banks with more than $50 billion in assets, but the rollback that passed this week, among other things, raises that threshold to $250 billion,” the Washington Post reported in 2018.

“Signature Bank has more than $40 billion in assets and can now grow significantly without automatically facing additional regulation. Frank has served on Signature’s board for three years and has received more than $1 million in payments from the bank during that time,” the report added.

When pressed at the time, Frank said while indeed stood to benefit from the rollback, his position at Signature Bank did not influence his decision.

“My being on the board has not changed my position on this at all,” Frank said. “These efforts began well before I began at Signature Bank.”

In 2009, Breitbart News editor Joel Pollak told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, “This guy is someone in a position of responsibility and authority. This guy is the one who’s making the regulations. He’s responsible, essentially, for recreating and redesigning our financial system, and he’s not taking any responsibility for what happened at all,” he added, referring to the global financial meltdown of 2008.