In the past, Warren has lambasted banks for purposefully creating opaque, obscure products to make a buck off of customers. (Her infamous phrase for some financial products? “Tricks and traps.”) But this time, in one of her first official appearances as a member of the administration, she took a conciliatory tone.

She continued to use the folksy cant she has picked up in the last few weeks. “My first public meeting after [my current] appointment was with bankers — bankers from Oklahoma, where I grew up, where my grandmother drove a wagon in the land rush, and where I learned to sing Boomer Sooner before I learned Old MacDonald,” she said to open her remarks. (Did she always talk like this?)

Then, the tone went conciliatory. “We are not working on the theory that all the men and all the women connected with finance, either as workers or investors, are to be regarded as guilty of some undefined crime,” she said, according to prepared remarks. “On the contrary, we hold that business based on good will should be encouraged.”

Warren pressed for a principles-based, rather than rules-based approach — describing questions like “Can a customer easily understand what this product does?” as more important than “Should we ban companies from selling redundant insurance for certain title problems?”

Nevertheless, the old attitude did shine through. “[C]redit agreements have gotten long and complicated. In fact, there’s a new epithet: fine print. I understand that some of you call it ‘mice type.’ Where I come from, nobody calls fine print, hidden fees and surprise penalties ‘negotiated contract terms’ or ‘innovations.’”

She continued: “On a polite day, my brothers in Oklahoma call that kind of stuff ‘garbage.’ They don’t care if it is there because regulators required it, because the companies’ lawyers were trying to ward off lawsuits, or because it was a good place to hide another new fee. They simply see a world in which the financial institutions they do business with are not on their side. Every surprise hidden in the fine print is a bad surprise.

“Instead of seeing banks as their friends — as I did when I put my babysitting money in a savings account at Penn Square National Bank so my brothers didn’t borrow it out of my sock drawer — too many Americans see dealing with banks like handling snakes — do it long enough and you’ll get bit.”

And there it is: conciliatory but wary, soft enough to charm banks and stringent enough to please the progressives that fought to make sure Warren had the role.

Instead of quickly passing a stimulus package, Congress should concentrate on putting some conditions on that bailout, Reich said, considering Wall Street’s recent tendency to treat it as a trip to the candy store. Banks are hoarding cash for takeovers and otherwise using it for their own purposes, rather than lending it to consumers as the bailout intended, The New York Times noted.

As TWI’s Matthew Blake noted, insurance company AIG executives spent $443,000 for a weeklong retreat at a resort and spa, just after getting an $85 billion bailout from the government.

In the middle of accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer money, the securities industry is still planning on awarding $20 billion in bonuses to top performers this year, with some getting the same amount they did last year — before they were partially nationalized.

I guess that’s Wall Street’s way of rewarding executives for their massive and unprecedented failures. From Reich:

Paulson’s taxpayer-financed bailout continues to put money into the wrong pockets. So another item Congress should get to as soon as it returns: amend the Bailout of All Bailouts (the so-called “Troubled Asset Recovery Program”) to force big banks to loan out at least 50 percent of the amounts they receive in cash from the government. In addition, because dollars are fungible — that is, a dollar received from the government functions the same as any other dollar of bank assets — the big bank beneficiaries of the bailout should be barred from (1) paying lobbyists who have anything whatever to do with administration or implementation of the bailout; (2) buying up other financial institutions; (3) paying dividends to shareholders; or (4) paying any bonuses or severance packages to any executives — as long as the bailout continues. There’s simply no excuse for using taxpayer dollars for any of these purposes.