The Man Who Ran the Bank Bailout Is the Fed’s Toughest Internal Critic

In 2008, as interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stability, Neel Kashkari oversaw the bailout of the country’s biggest banks. So this April, when JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon declared in his annual shareholder letter that the problem of too big to fail had been solved, Kashkari, now the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was more than ready to respond—in public.

In an unusual step for a Fed official, Kashkari wrote a medium.com post calling the banker’s assertions “demonstrably false.” It’s not only Dimon he opposes: Kashkari’s tactics fly in the face of the painstakingly complex approach his colleagues in Washington and New York have taken to regulatory reform. “I feel like we’re pushing the envelope in every possible way we can, within the bounds that we can control,” he says of the Minneapolis Fed under his leadership.