regulation

    The New York Times reports this morning that President Obama will announce a new push today for new limits on the size of banks and new prohibitions on their ability to conduct proprietary trading.

      The politics of this are obvious enough: after the Massachusetts disaster, which has dealt a major blow to the prospects for passing even a weak health care reform, Obama is reaching for something -- anything! -- to change the subject.   With the big bailed-out banks reporting hefty profits and ginormous bonuses this week, at the same time that they fight off regulation and a modest new tax, what better time than this to bash the banks.

      At this writing, we don't know any details about what Obama will propose.  They appear to echo ideas that Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, has been pushing in vain at least a year now.  

The New York Times has a front page story today about how Washington is considering some type of legislation that will increase the regulatory oversight on financial services firms much like how, in the wake of the Enron and Wolrdcom collapses, Sarbanes-Oxley changed how accounting firms and corporations could operate.

The fact that there are few specifics in the good story by Ed Andrews and Steve Labaton about what the increased regulations might be isn't surprising.  The discussions among policymakers are only a few weeks old and, as the story points out, really only got some momentum a week or so ago when the Federal Reserve began to take actions that could be called a Wall Street bailout. 

National Journal's CongressDaily reported today that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the supposed bastion of anti-regulation free market economic beliefs, today said a federal regulatory agency should deal with the tainted China imports problem. The key section: