Sheila Colleen Bair (born April 3, 1954) is an American civil servant who was the 19th Chair of the U.S.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is one of two agencies that supply deposit insurance to depositors in American depository institutions, the other being the National Credit Union Administration, which regulates and insures cred ...
(FDIC), during which time she assumed a prominent role in the government's response to the
2008 financial crisis
8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9.
In mathematics
8 is:
* a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2.
* a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of t ...
. She was appointed to the post for a five-year term on June 26, 2006, by
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...
through July 8, 2011.
[
] She was also the
28th president of
Washington College
Washington College is a private liberal arts college in Chestertown, Maryland. Maryland granted Washington College its charter in 1782. George Washington supported the founding of the college by consenting to have the "College at Chester" name ...
in
Chestertown, MD
Chestertown is a town in Kent County, Maryland, United States. The population was 5,252 as of the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Kent County.
History
Founded in 1706, Chestertown rose in stature when it was named one of the English col ...
, the first female head of the college in its 234-year history, a position she held from 2015 until her resignation in 2017.
Early life
Bair is a native of
Independence
Independence is a condition of a person, nation, country, or state in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the statu ...
,
Kansas
Kansas () is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka, and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is a landlocked state bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the ...
. Her father, Albert, was a
surgeon
In modern medicine, a surgeon is a medical professional who performs surgery. Although there are different traditions in different times and places, a modern surgeon usually is also a licensed physician or received the same medical training as ...
. Her mother, Clara, was a
nurse
Nursing is a profession within the health care sector focused on the care of individuals, families, and communities so they may attain, maintain, or recover optimal health and quality of life. Nurses may be differentiated from other health c ...
and housewife. She received her
bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ...
in philosophy from the
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. Tw ...
in 1975,
and worked as a bank teller for a brief period, before receiving a
J.D. from the
University of Kansas School of Law
The University of Kansas School of Law is the law school of the University of Kansas, a public research university in Lawrence, Kansas. The University of Kansas Law School was founded in 1893, replacing the earlier Department of Law, which had exi ...
in 1978. In 1981, she was recruited by
Senator
A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...
Bob Dole
Robert Joseph Dole (July 22, 1923 – December 5, 2021) was an American politician and attorney who represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1969 to 1996. He was the Republican Leader of the Senate during the final 11 years of his te ...
, a Republican from her state, to serve as counsel on his staff in Washington.
Career
Pre-FDIC career
Prior to her appointment at the FDIC, Bair was the Dean's Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy for the
Isenberg School of Management
The Isenberg School of Management is the business school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus for the University of Massachusetts system, located in Amherst, Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. The Is ...
at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
, a post she had held since 2002. She also served as
Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the
U.S. Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury (USDT) is the national treasury and finance department of the federal government of the United States, where it serves as an executive department. The department oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and t ...
(2001 to 2002), Senior Vice President for Government Relations of the
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed c ...
(1995 to 2000), a Commissioner and Acting Chair of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is an independent agency of the US government created in 1974 that regulates the U.S. derivatives markets, which includes futures, swaps, and certain kinds of options.
The Commodity Exchange Ac ...
(1991 to 1995), and Research Director, Deputy Counsel and Counsel to Kansas Republican
Senate Majority Leader
The positions of majority leader and minority leader are held by two United States senators and members of the party leadership of the United States Senate. They serve as the chief spokespersons for their respective political parties holding t ...
Bob Dole (1981 to 1988).
While an academic, Bair also served on the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Banking Policy. Bair also pursued a seat in the
U.S. Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is Bicameralism, bicameral, composed of a lower body, the United States House of Representatives, House of Representatives, and an upper body, ...
(she lost the 1990
Republican
Republican can refer to:
Political ideology
* An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law.
** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...
nomination in the
5th Kansas district by 760 votes to
Dick Nichols). Bair began her career in the General Counsel's office of the former
U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a Cabinet of the United States, cabinet-level United States federal executive departments, executive branch department of the U.S. federal government of the United States, fede ...
.
FDIC tenure
Bair was appointed to the 19th Chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on June 26, 2006, by George W. Bush.
[ She left the FDIC on July 8, 2011, when her five-year term expired.] She became a senior advisor to The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1948.
With over 6 billion in assets, its stated mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, a ...
in August 2011. She is chair emerita of the Systemic Risk Council
The Systemic Risk Council was formed in 2012 by The Pew Charitable Trusts and CFA Institute to help ensure the effective implementation of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and related measures related to mitigating sy ...
, a volunteer effort formed by the CFA Institute and the Pew Charitable Trusts to monitor and comment on regulation. Bair's book '' Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself '' was published September 25, 2012. The book was a ''New York Times'' and ''Wall Street Journal'' best seller. Bair has also written several books for children in a series published by Albert Whitman called Money Tales. Her books encourage savings and teach money basics: ''Rock, Brock and the Savings Shock'' (2006), ''Isabel's Car Wash'' (2008), ''Bullies of Wall Street'' (2015), ''Billy the Borrowing Blue Footed Booby'' (2021), ''Princess Persephone Loses the Castle'' (2021), ''Shark Scam'' (2022) and ''Princess Persephone Loses the Castle'' (2022).
Post-FDIC career
In May 2015, Bair was appointed president of Washington College, becoming the first female head of the college in its 234-year history. During her tenure as president, Bair helped implement several debt-reducing programs aimed at making a degree more affordable, including “Fixedfor4,” which guarantees tuition costs will not rise for students during their four years at college, and “Dam the Debt,” which awards scholarships to graduating seniors to help pay off federal student loans. Bair resigned on June 30, 2017, citing the demands of the job and insufficient time with her family.
Since leaving government service, Bair has served on a number of corporate boards. She is currently on the boards of Bunge Limited
Bunge Limited is an American agribusiness and food company, incorporated in Bermuda, and headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
As well as being an international soybean exporter, it is also involved in food processing, grain trad ...
, Lion Electric, and Fannie Mae
The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a United States government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) and, since 1968, a publicly traded company. Founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the N ...
. In November 2020, Bair was named the first woman Chair of Fannie Mae's board of directors. Bair previously was on the boards of Host Hotels & Resorts
Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc. is an American real estate investment trust that invests in hotels. As of February 19, 2021, the company owned 80 upscale hotels containing approximately 46,500 rooms in the United States, Brazil, and Canada.
History
I ...
, the state-run Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited (ICBC; ) is a Chinese multinational bank.
Founded as a limited company on 1 January 1984, ICBC is a state-owned commercial bank. With capital provided by the Ministry of Finance of China, the ...
(2017 to 2020), Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre.
Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...
and Santander
Santander may refer to:
Places
* Santander, Spain, a port city and capital of the autonomous community of Cantabria, Spain
* Santander Department, a department of Colombia
* Santander State, former state of Colombia
* Santander de Quilichao, a m ...
. She was criticized for joining the board of Santander, a Spanish banking group, which critics viewed as inconsistent with her public views on the revolving door
A revolving door typically consists of three or four doors that hang on a central shaft and rotate around a vertical axis within a cylindrical enclosure. Revolving doors are energy efficient as they, acting as an airlock, prevent drafts, thus de ...
. She has also served on a number of nonprofit boards, including as a founding director of the Volcker Alliance, the Center for Responsible Lending
The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) is a nonprofit organization research and policy group based in Durham, North Carolina. Its stated purpose is to educate the public about financial products and to push for policies that curb predatory len ...
, the RAND Corporation
The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...
, and the National Women's Law Center.
In 2021, Bair was appointed to a group advising the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation (IFRS) on setting up the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), which aims to create a set of global standards for firms reporting the impact of climate change. Also in 2021, Ms. Bair was appointed a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security Economists for Peace and Security (EPS) is a New York-based, United Nations accredited and registered global organization and network of thought-leading economists, political scientists, and security experts founded in 1989 that promotes non-militar ...
, a group of renowned economists and public servants concerned about issues of peace, conflict, war, and the world economy.
Bair is married to Scott P. Cooper and has two children, Preston and Colleen.
2008 financial crisis
Bair assumed a prominent role in the government's response to the 2008 financial crisis, working alongside and sometimes publicly opposing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
Henry Merritt Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is an American banker and financier who served as the 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the Chairman a ...
and Tim Geithner
Timothy Franz Geithner (; born August 18, 1961) is a former American central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank o ...
, then president of the New York Federal Reserve. She also helped shape the resulting Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly referred to as Dodd–Frank, is a United States federal law that was enacted on July 21, 2010. The law overhauled financial regulation in the aftermath of the Great Recessi ...
of 2010.
Shortly after taking charge of the FDIC in June 2006, Bair began warning of the potential systemic risks posed by the growing trend of subprime-mortgage-backed bonds. In the spring of 2007 she met privately with industry executives, urging them to modify adjustable-rate mortgages rather than allow homes to go into foreclosure, which could set off a cascading effect throughout the economy. In October 2007, Bair took her argument public with an op-ed in ''The New York Times''.
Within the Bush administration, Bair's mortgage modification argument was initially at odds with the Treasury Secretary who believed such action would have little effect. Bair also resisted many of the government bailouts of insolvent banks; rather she argued that the government should impose greater accountability by forcing those institutions to sell off bad assets, replace management and re-privatize them, more akin to how the FDIC handles smaller banks. Bair argued that when companies are viewed as “too big to fail” it leads to reckless behavior because there is an implicit guarantee of government support. Bair favored “market discipline,” meaning shareholders and bondholders would take losses when an institutional fails.
Bair fought against the Federal Reserve's adoption of the Basel II advanced approaches, which would have allowed large banks to use their own internal models to help set their regulatory capital requirements. In the aftermath of the crisis, Bair pressed the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a committee of banking supervisory authorities that was established by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten (G10) countries in 1974. The committee expanded its membership in 2009 a ...
to adopt strong capital and leverage standards. She successfully argued for international adoption of ‘Leverage Ratio’ – a strict capital requirement applying to all of a bank's assets to complement more subjective capital standards based on the perceived riskiness of a bank's assets.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program included a mortgage-relief plan partially modeled on Bair's loan-modification ideas. Following the crisis, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was drafted with a number of provisions Bair sought, including the FDIC's expanded powers to seize large financial institutions, place agency examiners on-site within banks, recover pay from executives deemed responsible for an institution's failure, and the requirement of banks to create a ‘Living Will’ as a guide for orderly resolution.
In a fictional TV movie about the crises, Patricia Randell played Bair in the 2011 HBO
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...
movie ''Too Big to Fail
"Too big to fail" (TBTF) and "too big to jail" is a theory in banking and finance that asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the great ...
'', based on the popular book of the same name by ''New York Times'' journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is an American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for ''The New York Times'' and a co-anchor of CNBC's ''Squawk Box.'' He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news s ...
.
2020 Coronavirus pandemic
In March 2020, Bair called for the Federal Reserve to focus on getting credit flowing to U.S. businesses affected by the spreading coronavirus and workers losing their jobs. In an op-ed for the ''Financial Times
The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nik ...
'', Bair called for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to require systemically important banks to suspend discretionary bonuses, dividends and shareholder buybacks in order to impede losses while expanding their balance sheets to support increased borrowing from businesses hurt by the pandemic. The Bank of England
The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and still one of the bankers for the Government of ...
and European Central Bank
The European Central Bank (ECB) is the prime component of the monetary Eurosystem and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) as well as one of seven institutions of the European Union. It is one of the world's Big Four (banking)#Intern ...
subsequently pressed their banks to do so.
Reputation
In 2009, Bair was named one of ''Time'' magazine's "Time 100" most influential people. In 2008, Bair topped ''The Wall Street Journal's'' annual 50 "Women to Watch List." In 2008 and 2009, ''Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...
'' ranked
A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second.
In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of ...
her as the second most powerful woman in the world behind German chancellor
The chancellor of Germany, officially the federal chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany,; often shortened to ''Bundeskanzler''/''Bundeskanzlerin'', / is the head of the federal government of Germany and the commander in chief of the Ger ...
Angela Merkel
Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Oppo ...
. ''Forbes'' described her FDIC office as "the last stop for capital-starved banks (and their insured customers) before going under."
Awards
Bair received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award.
In 2009, Bair was presented the Consumer Federation of America
The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) is a non-profit organization founded in 1968 to advance consumer interests through research, education and advocacy.
According to CFA's website, its members are nearly 300 consumer-oriented non-profits, w ...
's Philip Hart
Philip Aloysius Hart (December 10, 1912December 26, 1976) was an American lawyer and politician. A Democrat, he served as a United States Senator from Michigan from 1959 until his death from cancer in Washington, D.C. in 1976. He was known as t ...
Public Service Award.
In 2011, Bair was named of named one of America's Top Leaders by ''The Washington Post'' and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership
The Center for Public Leadership (CPL) is an academic research center at Harvard University that provides teaching, research and training in the practical skills of leadership for people in government, nonprofits, and business. Located at Harvard ...
.
On March 29, 2012, Bair was honored by th
Romney Institute of Public Management
(BYU Marriott School of Management
The Marriott School of Business is the business school of Brigham Young University (BYU), a private university owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and located in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1891 and renamed i ...
) as the Administrator of the Year.
Publications
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
External links
*
*
*
*
*
, -
, -
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bair, Sheila C
1954 births
American chairpersons of corporations
American women in business
Chairpersons of non-governmental organizations
Chairs of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Chairwomen
Commodity Futures Trading Commission personnel
Kansas Republicans
Living people
New York Stock Exchange people
People from Independence, Kansas
Presidents of Washington College
United States Assistant Secretaries of the Treasury
University of Kansas School of Law alumni
University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
Women business executives
Women heads of universities and colleges
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China people
George W. Bush administration personnel
Clinton administration personnel
Obama administration personnel
21st-century American women