If you needed to appeal to one authority on banking regulation, you could do worse than to consult Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the FDIC. And now she’s advocating scrapping the Volcker rule and starting over. She comes at this by looking at the spectacle of MF Global – a brokerage house that would [...]

Time to pile on to the Jamie Dimon persecution complex. Dimon, the CEO of JPMorganChase, told the Financial Times that new global rules on capital requirements are “un-American.” The Basel III capital rules are designed to make the financial system safer by making banks build up risk-absorbent “core tier one” capital to at least 7 [...]

I don’t think I’ve stressed enough why servicers have a financial incentive to foreclose rather than to modify loans, so I’m fortunate that the New York Times editorial page does it for me. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the servicers basically have become arms of the banks, which is not [...]

Russ Feingold has explained his reasoning for opposing the financial reform bill. At the start of this process I made clear that I had a simple test for financial reform — will it stop another financial meltdown? This bill fails that test, and I won’t support legislation that fails to protect the people of Wisconsin [...]

One of Wall Street’s finest slipped and told the New York Times that the financial reform bill wouldn’t affect their core business to any major degree. Many executives spent the weekend trying to assess the impact of the legislation, which has yet to take final form. With some crucial differences between the House and Senate [...]

After voting against cloture on the Wall Street reform bill, Russ Feingold released this statement: “After thirty years of giving in to the wishes of Wall Street lobbyists, Congress needs to finally enact tough reforms to prevent Wall Street from driving our economy into the ditch again. We need to eliminate the risk posed to [...]

I’ve been using a #lordofthefliesonthesenatefloor hashtag to discuss the Wall Street reform bill today, and I think it accurately describes what’s going on. Basically, Harry Reid tried to line up a cloture vote today to end debate, and he got buy-off from the center-right, with Ben Nelson and Susan Collins agreeing to vote for it. [...]

I’ve seen some commentary about the gradual improvements to the Wall Street reform bill in the Senate. And too be sure, a few amendments have gotten by that would be beneficial, some of them quite beneficial. Would any of them they change the way Wall Street does business? No, I don’t think so, though those [...]

The passage of the Sanders audit the Fed compromise does not signal the end of the amendment process to the Wall Street reform bill. In fact, several other measures should get a chance to become part of the legislation in a series of votes leading up to final passage. And many of them would greatly [...]

In a fiery speech on the Senate floor, Russ Feingold conditioned his support for the Wall Street reform measure on adding a multitude of amendments that would break up the mega-banks, cap size and leverage and restore the firewall between commercial and investment banks. He even went so far as to say that he would [...]

The New York Times takes a look at the “liberal amendments” to the Wall Street reform bill, which are actually just common-sense amendments to deal with the problem of an overheated financial sector, but which put those who just want to nibble around the edges and no put meaningful constraints on the big banks in [...]