Trouble Among the Regulators

What began a fortnight ago as a Senate investigation of crooks in banking turned last week into a disquieting exposure of the Government's own performance at supervising banks. It proved a tough week for the man who charters and monitors national banks, Comptroller of the Currency James J. Saxon, long one of Washington's most controversial figures.

First, Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin complained to Arkansas Senator John McClellan's Senate Investigations Subcommittee that Saxon withheld confidential evidence of irregularities at the San Francisco National Bank, thus misleading the Federal Reserve into lending the bank $9,260,000 when it was about to fail. Two of Saxon's own aides not only confirmed this lack of communication but added that Saxon waited eight months to tell the Justice Department about indications that the bank's president was accepting kickbacks for approving loans.

Then the deposed president of the San Francisco bank, Don C. Silverthorne, whose "gross dishonesty" Saxon had blamed for its collapse, turned up at the hearings and told newsmen in a corridor confrontation that he gave "booze, cigars and virgin-wool shirts" to both Saxon and his West Coast regional director, Arnold E. Larsen. "I don't give liquor by the bottle," smiled Silverthorne. "I give it by the case."

Through all this, Saxon remained untypically silent, though he did write the Federal Reserve denying that his men had withheld any reports that "it requested." But the revelations of friction between the Comptroller, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, all of which now divide the task of bank regulation, produced strong demands for some sort of reform. In a San Francisco speech, James L. Robertson, one of the Federal Reserve's seven governors, declared that today's "tangle of overlapping responsibilities, conflicting philosophies and procedural cross-purposes cannot be tolerated much longer." Merely "knocking heads together" will not solve the problem, said Robertson. "The defect is in the structure."

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