Newswise — Sheila C. Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, will be the speaker at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Undergraduate Commencement ceremony on May 15 at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. One of the highest profile women in Washington, D.C., Bair last year received the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage Award for her early warnings about the subprime lending crisis.
The Undergraduate Commencement, which starts at 10 a.m., will celebrate the graduation of 4,200 UMass Amherst students, an event that typically draws an audience of more than 20,000.
In 2009, Forbes magazine ranked Bair as the second most powerful woman in the world behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In November 2008, Bair topped The Wall Street Journal’s roster of the year’s 50 Women to Watch. U.S. News & World Report has also named her as the nation’s 10th Top Market Mover.
Bair is currently on leave as the Dean’s Professor of Regulatory Policy at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.
More recently, Bair has frequently called for creating a framework that would allow regulators to dismantle a large non-bank financial institution. She says the lack of such a mechanism has sustained the belief that some financial institutions are just simply “too big to fail” – an idea she rejects. Bair joined the university in 2003 and is a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department. Bair’s role in the ongoing financial crisis has been far-reaching. In 2008, she oversaw the FDIC’s takeover of 25 banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase’s acquisition of Washington Mutual, the largest failed bank in U.S. history. She also successfully navigated the difficult challenges of the financial crisis, helping to ensure that the government’s response helped Main Street depositors and troubled borrowers.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, she was an early critic of subprime mortgage lending practices and has been a staunch advocate for loan modifications that make economic sense for both homeowners and lenders. In May 2006, Bush nominated Bair to a five-year term as head of the FDIC. Bair’s research at UMass examined the structure and policies of the financial regulatory environment. It also explored expanding access to financial services by low-income groups. Her 2004 study, “Consumer Ramifications of an Optional Federal Charter for Life Insurers,” which recommended dual federal/state chartering for the life insurance industry, received widespread media coverage from the New York Times, CNN Financial News, The American Banker and a dozen other outlets. Her report, “Low Cost Payday Loans: Opportunities and Obstacles,” advocated that banks and credit unions offer their low- and middle-income customers lower-cost alternatives to high-cost payday loans.
Other studies done by Bair have examined the Federal Home Loan banking system, access to the U.S. banking system by Latin American immigrants and a host of other financial regulatory issues.
Bair served on policy boards for the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Banking Policy; the Center for Responsible Lending; the Investor Education Board; and the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association (IMSA). From 1991-95, she was a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and was its acting chairman in 1994. She has more than two decades of public policy experience in Washington, D.C. Bair earned a law degree and bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas.
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