financial regulatory reform

As we noted on Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee is in the midst of tackling financial regulatory reform, which has brought out the lobbyists in full force. Here’s just a small taste of the action so far: American Banker is reporting that the committee is close to carving out an exemption for community banks [...]

The watering down of the proposal for a new consumer financial protection agency continues, with the latest victim the end of vanilla option. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee this week that the option was being dropped. Via Felix Salmon, Mike Konczal at Rortybomb explains why this [...]

President Obama called on Wall Street today to stop fighting financial regulation and to instead embrace reform, Bloomberg reported. Speaking at Federal Hall in New York City on the first anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, Obama used plain language to explain to all the financial wizards who brought us this crisis that they [...]

This should come as no surprise: Even the mere mention of the possibility of bringing back cramdown legislation prompted the Mortgage Bankers Association to spring into action. Here’s the group’s rapid response to comments this week from several powerful Democrats, who who threatened to renew efforts to allow bankruptcy judges to change, or cramdown, mortgage [...]

What’s up with the Obama administration’s much-vaunted plans for financial regulatory reform? First, The Washington Post reports that an ambitious proposal for a systemic risk regulator — a single agency to regulate and monitor banking and  intervene if threats to the financial system emerge — is getting bogged down by all kinds of opposition. Smaller [...]