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Bob Davidson
Janilu,
The short answer is that I grew up and had kids.
A longer answer, leaving out the confidential details, is that I worked for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation during the banking crisis of the 1980s and saw too much governmental sausage-making. There was an absolutely mind-shattering change in that agency in 1992 when Clinton's people took over from Bush's at the top level. In the weeks before the 1992 election, the people who ran First City Bank, one of the Texas mega-banks at the time, pulled a bunch of shenanigans that essentially spit in the face of the banking regulators, obviously believing that Bush wouldn't let a major bank fail right before the election. I was an attorney in the liquidation division and worked with the Office of the Controller of the Currency and the FDIC regulatory division, regularly in a very intense fashion when we actually shut down a bank. I also knew the DC lawyers in my area pretty well and heard all the inside intel about what was going on at the higher levels of the government. Bush's appointees in our agencies were all slightly dull, but competent technocrat types.
First City was run by a clique of political heavyweights who believed that their house of cards was too big to fail so we were flabberghasted when the week before the election, the word came from Washington to take down First City. All of the Texas FDIC branches, Addison, Midland and Houston, were assigned banks and we prepared for the closure. At that time we didn't have branch banking in Texas, so each First City was a separately chartered national bank and would have to be individually shut down. Most of the banks were actually solvent on their own, but the big Houston and Dallas banks had spread the destruction by making the smaller banks participate in their risky loans.
I voted early, since I'd be in Beaumont working 18 hour plus days during the election, for Clinton, since I couldn't forget the "read my lips' betrayal and he was what I thought should be ruling the country, a third-way democrat, conservative on economics and liberal on social issues. First City -- Beaumont was something I hadn't seen in my previous three years liquidating banks: a well-run, essentially solvent bank that was taken down by participation deals with First City -- Houston. We were used to essentially rotten banks that deserved to die.
While we were still dealing with First City fallout, in January, our little world at the FDIC tuned upside down. All of the Bush political appointees left and Clinton's people came in. The new Chairman and General Counsel and their immediate staffs couldn't have been more different from the Bushies -- no knowledge of the banking world, but totally aware of politics. They shuffled bureaucrats around, the absolutely brilliant bunch that came up with the Financial Institution Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 all left and went to work for giant law firms representing banks against the FDIC. [I was friends with all of those guys (they were all male and mostly East Coast Jewish lawyers from second-tier law schools like Fordham or BU), since I'd been the attorney at the very first bank closing after FIRREA went into effect -- First State Bank in Liberty -- and worked in an insanely intense way with them to redo all of the procedures and documents we used so that they conformed with the radically new law.] They were replaced by gay and female WASPs from Ivy League law schools, who'd been sideline executive level Washington nobodies under Bush's people. We quickly figured out that the new big bosses were every bit as incompetent as they were egotistical. None of them had ever actually closed a bank or litigated a case; they were Washington insiders.
Our instructions went from a sort of dull "follow the law and do it right" to "get Washington approval before you do anything." They stopped shutting down bad banks. FIRREA shut down the insolvent Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation and set up the Resolution Trust Corporation, run by the same clowinshly clueless people who'd killed the FSLIC through their incompetence, to administer the S & L carcasses. Under Clinton's people they were folded into the FDIC and put in charge.
They consolidated the FDIC into a limited number of offices. My then-wife was not willing to live in Orange County California -- I was too junior by one to get to move to Addison, so I went back into private practice with my eyes open as to what liberals and Democrats are and do.
After that, I could never vote for one of those people again.
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