The banking industry and tough questions

Loren Steffy of the Houston Chronicle recalls one of his first assignments on the biz beat. He was attending a press conference for a story on the second failure of Dallas' Sunbelt Savings.
At that press event Steffy writes that, "Regulators overseeing the bailout fielded questions from reporters, and the busted thrift's chief executive, Tom Wageman, sat silently in the corner. When reporters tried to ask a question of Wageman, who'd served as Sunbelt's pitchman in its TV ads, the feds answered."
Now two decades later, he says, the government is still protecting the banking industry from tough questions.
He writes, "John Reich, who heads the Office of Thrift Supervision — a bureaucracy that inherited some of the FHLB's responsibilities — deemed media coverage of the banking burnout "reprehensible" in a speech to an industry conference in Florida this week."
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