Yesterday, in her first hearing as a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wasted no time in turning up the heat on the heads of the nation's seven top financial regulators (from the SEC, Treasury, Federal Reserve, FDIC, Comptroller of the Currency, CFPB, and the CFTC). "The question I really want to ask," Sen. Warren stated, "is about how tough you are? About how much leverage you really have in these settlements [with Wall Street financial institutions]? .... Tell me a little bit about the last few times you've taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial? ... [SILENCE] ... Anybody??"

The video of this portion of the hearing is below and it is interesting to watch Sen. Warren at work, but I'll spare you a few minutes of viewing and provide the answer to the senator's question: Not one of the regulatory heads in the room could provide any information on when their agency had actually taken a large financial institution to trial. 

SEC Chair Elisse Walter started to testify about how the SEC "look[s] at the distinction between what we could get if we go to trial, and what we could get if we don't" (essentially explaining why the SEC settles most of its big cases) but Sen. Warren was not interested in deviating from her simple question, and quickly interrupted Walter: "I appreciate that," Sen. Warren said. "That's what everybody does. And so the question I'm really asking is, can you identify when you last took the Wall Street banks to trial?" Walter could only reply that she "will have to get back to you with the specific information." Sen. Warren's then invited the remaining regulators in the room to discuss when they last took a Wall Street bank to trial, and received no response.

"I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial,'" Sen. Warren concluded. "That just seems wrong to me." 

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