By Marci Greenstein When it comes to protecting citizens from unfair credit card and lending practices, what does the chair of the panel overseeing the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street want? She wants Congress to cut through the “complexity machine” created by the financial industry – in the form of hidden fees, arbitrary rate hikes, and unintelligible, lengthy, one-sided contracts for credit cards, homes loans and cars. Elizabeth Warren wants to make obtaining credit simple, clear, and fair. [caption id="attachment_7116" align="alignleft" width="109" caption="Elizabeth Warren"][/caption] “I expect to pay for what I get, but I don’t want to be tricked.”  That was the message, delivered with extraordinary clarity by the Harvard Law School professor, a noted expert on bankruptcy law and chair of Congress' TARP oversight panel, to an audience March 11 at the New America Foundation's Washington, D.C. offices. According to Warren, the “complexity machine” got started in the 1980s as banks began complicating and increasing the small print in credit card and other lending agreements.

John Cassidy's New Yorker profile of Tim Geithner mostly makes a single argument, with that argument contained in the  sub-head: "Timothy Geithner's financial plan is working -- and making him very unpopular." This has become the prevailing wisdom on the Geithner beat -- summarized equally well a few weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Solomon. This part of Cassidy's conclusion, though, is fresh and interesting:

Here's an interesting bit from a New York Times' editorial today critical of Barack Obama's home foreclosure prevention policies: The administration’s $75 billion antiforeclosure program, which subsidizes lenders to rework bad loans, has been a big disappointment. One reason is that its usual method of modifying loans — lowering the ...

The Wall Street Journals's Michael R. Crittenden and Marshall Eckblad report: U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942, suggesting that the industry's continued slide is making it harder for the economy to recover. While top-tier banks are recovering at a faster clip, the rest of the industry is still suffering, according to a quarterly report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Banks fighting for survival, especially those plagued by losses on commercial real estate, are less willing to extend loans, siphoning credit from businesses and consumers.

The Wall Street Journal's Deborah Solomon has a sympathetic profile of Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner who from now on will always be referred to as "embattled Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner." The article is well-reported but confusing because Solomon says that Geithner is perceived as being in bed with Wall Street. But then we learn later in the piece, that perception = reality: Geithner really is in bed with Wall Street. Here's the perception part:

Zachary Goldfarb's Washington Post analysis of the SEC's troubles under chairman Mary Schapiro does a lot to explain what the agency has been unable to do.  It outlines the opposition from Wall Street interests to many of Schapiro's initiatives, from greater access to board seats for disparate groups of ...

[caption id="attachment_6739" align="alignleft" width="159" caption="Fannie Mae's not-quite-spartan headquarters"][/caption] ProPublica has a new page tracking what has happened to the $700 billion in "bailout" money Congress appropriated back in 2008 to the Troubled Asset Relief Program. What's made clear is that this is now a bailout of government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Most of the mega-banks that have received bailout money have returned it, however prematurely. But Fannie and Freddie have returned just $4 billion of their original $110 billion bailout. And according to Barack Obama's budget proposal, Fannie and Freddie will need $77 billion more in bailout money. When the financial meltdown happened, many Congressional Republicans claimed that Fannie and Freddie, not investment banks like Lehman Brothers, were the real reason behind the collapse.

Jenny Anderson and Zachery Kouwe of the New York Times deliver this important overview of the SEC's enforcement team -- the group that is responsible for policing Wall Street, hedge funds, credit-default swaps, and corrupt investment peddlers like "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" ...

The New York Times' Louise Story reports that just as the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its investigation of Bank of America, New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo is suing the bank. The lawsuit stems from the well-established allegation that when Bank of America acquired Merrill ...

Today Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and old Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson testify before the House oversight committee about the Federal Reserve's November 2008 decision that 80 percent taxpayer-owned AIG pay in full its insured contracts. The result from that decision was that banks the Treasury ...