Step right up and Spin the Revolving Door – and what is your prize? Why, a nice job on Wall Street working for the people you used to regulate – you wrote in the loopholes, now you get the cash for exploiting them! Latest contestants – staffers working for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). [...]

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa’s perch, has released a new report on the practice of now-defunct mortgage lender Countrywide handing out special mortgages at low rates to members of Congress and other key officials through their “VIP” program. And it does not appear to pick sides or divvy up the information [...]

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and [...]

The biggest Internet presence in the world will have something to add to the growing online protests against anti-piracy legislation, though they won’t go as far as shutting down their operations. Google plans to highlight the issue with an action item on their famously spare homepage. “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose [...]

This is a major breaking story. The main reason that the lame duck session was so productive was that the rest of the legislative session was so UNPRODUCTIVE, because the Republicans were able to ran out the clock. Senate Democrats are taking a stand and saying, we cannot work this way anymore. All Democratic senators [...]

Ted Strickland, the defeated Governor of Ohio, despaired yesterday that Democrats would lose the tax cut debate. Talking, unprompted, about the debate over the expiring Bush tax cuts, Strickland said he was dumbfounded at the party’s inability to sell the idea that the rates for the wealthy should be allowed to expire. “I mean, if [...]

I’m going to agree with Yves Smith that yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on foreclosure fraud went really badly for the banks. Now, it’s a Senate hearing, and it’ll soon be filed away with all the other Senate hearings, never to threaten a banker again. But we’ve gone from a point where this issue was [...]

It’s hard for me to stir up any genuine outrage or praise over the imminent Elizabeth Warren appointment, because I don’t really know what it is, and for that matter, nobody else does. I trust Warren to make the most of whatever job has been offered, but find the best response to be “Meh.” Asked [...]

Chris Dodd doesn’t expect a vote on three nominees to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Janet Yellen, Sarah Bloom Raskin and Peter Diamond have been awaiting confirmation for months. U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) said Tuesday he didn’t know how much appetite there was among senators to vote on three nominees to the [...]

So a flurry of activity signifying nothing on the Elizabeth Warren/CFPB front. Fox News thought they heard that she would get the interim appointment. Then they retracted it. White House spokesman Bill Burton would only say that she’s “in the mix” for the job. Enough plugged-in reporters have speculated that she could get an interim [...]

I think it’s important to recognize that “the White House” is not a monolith. There are sometimes counteracting forces there, and one aide may not know what the other aide is pushing. Increasingly the internecine fights get aired out in public, though typically anonymously. That’s the best way to read this denial of the plan [...]