If financial regulators want to prove that they’re willing to take the necessary steps to protect the public and not the banks, they will soon have a great opportunity. Today, Public Citizen will send a formal petition to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, asking them to “recognize that [...]

The Obama Administration is going around telling liberal groups that they won’t much like the budget they’ll put forward at the end of the month. OF COURSE liberals won’t like this budget. It’s being produced under a spending cap. The spending cap necessarily cuts investment as a percentage of GDP to Eisenhower-era levels, and it [...]

The EPA has been under assault from the GOP for the past year, and this has led to some uncomfortable rollbacks and compromises. The Administration’s cancellation of new ozone standards was particularly galling. But today, the EPA came through with new rules on mercury and air toxics that will deliver massive public health benefits, in [...]

People in the know claim this is a huge ruling in New York, and it’s not hard to see why. A decade after then Attorney General Eliot Spitzer dusted off the long dormant Martin Act and deployed it to become the “Sheriff of Wall Street,” the Court of Appeals has essentially deputized private citizens in [...]

As part of the omnibus spending bill, which has not quite yet been made law due to the blowup of the payroll tax deal, the federal government will delay enforcement of new regulations for increased energy efficiency in light bulbs. Republicans claim that this delay, achieved through blocking Energy Department funding for enforcement through Fiscal [...]

The recess appointment fight nominally only concerns Richard Cordray, the nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans want to block his confirmation because they stop the agency from gaining regulatory powers over non-bank financial institutions if they remain without a director. So they’re using the nomination fight as a proxy to force changes [...]

Now that we know the state of play on the one year-end bill left outstanding, let’s redirect to the one that’s moving through the system currently. The House just passed the omnibus appropriations bill, funding all government agencies through the rest of the fiscal year, until September 30, 2012. It’s on to the Senate, where [...]

The Obama Administration will provide wage protections for home care workers via executive order, a promising proposal for over two million workers previously exempted from coverage. The move is another in the “We Can’t Wait” proposals the Administration has been leaking out for a couple months. Twenty-nine states currently exempt home health care workers from [...]

The House released their version of a year-end bill to extend unemployment benefits, a payroll tax cut and a “doc fix” to avoid a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement. A look at the various elements of the bill make clear that Republicans have little interest in passing anything through Congress. The bill, written by House [...]

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 [...]

If the President wants to show the country that he now wants to give Americans a fair shake and break up the “invisible government” that exists in parallel with Wall Street, he could give a statement on last night’s 60 Minutes story on two whistleblowers at mortgage originators who stand ready to work with the [...]