Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) discuss financial regulations on Monday. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

Yesterday evening, Senate Democrats began the procedural endgame to their push to reform the regulation of the financial sector. In a 57-41 final vote, with Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) joining Republicans in opposition (and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) switching his final vote for procedural reasons), the Senate failed to agree to start formal debate of the American Financial Stability Act, crafted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). Democrats need party unity and a Republican crossover to move the bill forward, and the G.O.P. has signaled it wants to sign on to the popular legislation — particularly in light of the public outrage at Wall Street giants such as Goldman Sachs. But working long hours over the weekend and on Monday, the Republican and Democratic sides failed to reach a compromise.

[Economy1]Unusual for legislation under such long consideration, substantive portions of the bill remain the subject of intense debate. Republicans object to central provisions in Dodd’s financial reform bill — and in some cases are advocating for far more stringent measures. Even many Democrats are advocating for adopting stricter rules to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail, too interconnected, or too risky in the future.

When Democrats manage to get a crossover to begin formal debate, a number of central tenets of the bill might change via amendment. In the meantime, significant rewriting might take place before the bill moves forward. Here is a guide to the most important issues at hand, and the key players advocating for changes.

Audit the Fed. Last year, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced a House bill to audit the Federal Reserve. It garnered 313 cosponsors. A similar measure in the Senate, a budget amendment sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), passed 95 to 1. But a strong provision did not make it into the final Senate legislation. And with the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet more than double its size before the financial crisis — swollen with $1.1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities purchased from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plus toxic assets from failed companies like Bear Sterns — a bipartisan group of senators want to force a thorough independent audit of the Fed’s books. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is sponsoring an amendment that would open up the Fed to an Government Accountability Office audit. The amendment has the stated support of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), among others, and is expected to come up.

End too big to fail by capping bank size. Sanders also wrote a measure to break up the banks that failed to make it out of the Senate Budget Committee last week. But the notion of breaking up big banks is a popular one, and sure to come via amendment. Dodd’s bill as currently written gives the Federal Reserve and other regulators the ability to seize and break up financial firms it deems systemically important and systemically dangerous. But that is meant only as a “last resort,” and members of both parties consider the language too wan. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) last week introduced the Safe Banking Act, which they plan to offer as an amendment to the Dodd bill. It mandates hard leverage and size caps on banks and other financial firms; limits commercial banks’ assets to 2 percent of GDP and non-banks’ assets to 3 percent; and imposes a 16-to-1 leverage cap, among other provisions.

Reinstitute Glass-Steagall provisions. Another popular way to effectively limit bank size is to return to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall rules. The Glass-Steagall Act, mostly repealed in 1999, prevented banks from having both commercial and investment banking arms — as, for instance, J.P. Morgan Chase does today. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plan to introduce an amendment reintroducing the rule and thus requiring big, diversified banks to split themselves up. Shelby, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) also support the measure.

An effectively similar, if functionally different, way of breaking up banks or limiting their size is by instituting the Volcker Rule — which bars banks from speculating with their own money by “prop trading” or investing in hedge funds. The current Dodd bill promises to institute something like the Volcker Rule, creating a commission to look at how to institute it down the road. But Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) have ready a measure introducing a more-stringent version immediately.

Fix the ratings agencies. The Dodd bill does little to fix the credit ratings agencies, whose profligate stamping of AAA ratings on collapsing subprime mortgage-backed securities helped to stoke the crisis. (The companies have a conflict of interest at the core of their business, in that they are paid by the companies whose securities they rate.) The Dodd bill creates a new office at the Securities and Exchange Commission to look closely at credit ratings agencies — but does little more to further reform them. Numerous Democratic senators have cited the issue as a major weakness in the bill, and Senate staffers say it is unlikely to go unchanged. Sanders has said he will introduce new language to strengthen oversight over and regulation of the agencies.

Guarantee no taxpayer money will go to bank bailouts. Republicans have derided the Dodd bill’s resolution authority fund — wherein the government will tax $50 billion from the banks, creating a pool of cash to be used by the Federal Reserve to shut down failing firms — as creating “permanent bailouts.” GOP politicians including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have cited it as a major point of contention. But Senate staffers say that rather than killing the resolution-authority fund, Republicans want language explicitly guaranteeing taxpayers will not be on the hook for future bailouts.

Keep the Fed the regulator of little banks. Under the Dodd bill, the Federal Reserve would have oversight only of banks with more than $50 billion in assets. But Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) oppose this measure and want the Fed to have oversight of small banks as well — ensuring that the Fed does not become overly concerned with the business of big banks and ensuring that it keeps an eye on the small financial companies that can be the bellwether of bad economic times. Hutchison has said she plans to “certainly have an amendment that assures that state banks and community banks will be able to have access to be members of the Federal Reserve.”

Make the Consumer Financial Protection Agency truly independent. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) has promised to introduce amendment moving the Consumer Financial Protection Agency outside of the Fed.

Improve hedge fund reporting. Reed also plans to introduce an amendment closing a loophole in the Dodd bill that might let some private equity firms, venture capital firms, and hedge funds avoid registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in bonuses to its employees for work performed in 2008.

That is nearly four times more than the company revealed in late March when asked by POLITICO to detail its total bonus payments. At that time, AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh said the firm paid about $120 million in 2008 bonuses to a pool of more than 6,000 employees.

The figure Ashooh offered was, in turn, substantially higher than company CEO Edward Liddy claimed days earlier in testimony before a House Financial Services Subcommittee. Asked how much AIG had paid in 2008 bonuses, Liddy responded: “I think it might have been in the range of $9 million.”

“I was shocked to see that the number has nearly quadrupled this time,” said Cummings. “I simply cannot fathom why this company continues to erode the trust of the public and the U.S. Congress, rather than being forthcoming about these issues from the start.”

I wonder if the higher figure will again spur the kind of public outrage brought on by the earlier bonus disclosures. Good thing for AIG that it’s not getting back in line for another bailout.

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

DeSantis also aims at Liddy directly:

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

This tidbit on Liddy’s timing is particularly interesting:

At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts — until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress.

Read it for yourself, and decided whether DeSantis deserves your sympathy. But whether or not you agree with his side of the story, it’s worth hearing. In the outrage and anger of last week, not everyone’s voice was heard.

Maybe the real outrage is the covert second bailout to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and other investment houses that were AIG’s trading partners. And maybe there’s more fury to come this week, when the administration rolls out its new plan to provide subsidies to private investors to buy up toxic assets from banks.

First, on the covert bailout, Joe Nocera at The New York Times summed it up this way:

There is a much bigger issue that has barely been touched upon by Congress: the way tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money has been funneled to A.I.G.’s counterparties — at 100 cents on the dollar. How can it possibly make sense that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and every other company that bought credit-default swaps from A.I.G. should be made whole by the government? Why isn’t it forcing them to take a haircut?

What’s worse, some of those companies are foreign banks that used credit-default swaps to exploit a regulatory loophole. Should the United States taxpayer really be responsible for ensuring the safety of European banks that were taking advantage of European regulations?

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism made exactly this point earlier this month, when AIG’s rescue details were becoming clear:

Bottom line: covert subsidies were given to bank via AIG. Remember, Henry Paulson, who had perilously few inhibitions about shoveling money at banks, even when the pretexts were often dubious and the checks non-existent, nevertheless was afraid to overpay openly for dud assets, which is why he retreated from his original conception of the TARP as as way to hoover up bad debt.

But AIG? No problem. CDS are arcane, and these were bi-lateral contracts (while the dud TARP asset were in most cases securities, so in many cases, third parties could formulate a rough view as to where they might trade).

Wake up and smell the coffee. The public purse is being looted and we the great unwashed are being fed pablum. Just because the perps work for once esteemed institutions and are typically treated with deference does not change the nature of the undertaking.

It was the AIG bonuses that first aroused populist rage, with the lavish homes of the bonus recipients an easy and convenient target. Now, it seems, more details of the AIG rescue are coming to light, with more reasons for anger. And just wait until Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally unveils this week the administration’s plan to buy up toxic assets from banks. AIG bonus outrage, I think, will be supplanted by mounting unhappiness over who, exactly, we keep bailing out: Unsecured creditors and private investors, apparently.

Some details of the plan leaked over the weekend. Yves Smith called it “a lot of bells and whistles to finesse the fact that the government will wind up paying well above market for crappy paper.”

Paul Krugman went ballistic:

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

I guess the best that can be said is the plan will at least take some attention away from anger over the AIG bonuses. But it won’t stop the questions about our government’s generosity toward AIG’s trading partners — or why the government is going out of its way to subsidize private investors.