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.

The Washington Post's Binyamin Appelbaum points out a simple way Barack Obama can do financial reform: appoint stronger regulators. In the next year, Obama can name a new comptroller of the currency, head of the Office of Thrift Supervision, and chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Obama could ...

This bit from the New York Times' Sewell Chan's article on Ben Bernanke's Senate confirmation is pretty interesting: In several hours of debate, senators said that the Fed had abetted, then ignored, the housing and credit bubbles and allowed banks to keep dangerously low capital reserves and to make reckless ...

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 ...

The Wall Street Journal's Michael R. Crittenden and John D. McKinnon report that Neil Barofsky, the inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, will investigate the Federal Reserve's decision in November 2008 to subsidize AIG's payments to insured counter-parties such as Goldman Sachs. Crittenden and McKinninon write: "Among ...

Looking at what David Stockman has to say about banking reform in the New York Times, you can see how he managed to captivate politicians like Ronald Reagan and tick off insiders like ...

Charlie Peters has been blogging longer than some of his readers have been alive.  "Tilting at Windmills," his feature in The Washington Monthly, has been coming out for more than 30 years, and his crisp and concise writing, combined with a very clear voice, are a great model for bloggers today.  But that's not the main thing.  The main thing is that Charlie has a great eye for corruption, malfeasance, and just plain lousy behavior, especially when it's covered with a gloss of professionalism or elitism.  In the latest Monthly, he picks up on a truly outrageous thing -- government conferences being held at swanky hotels that the average American could never get close to.

The Washington Post's Michael Shear and Binyamin Appelbaum report that the Obama administration is considering to insert a one-time fee on bailed out banks as part of its proposed 2010 budget. President Obama has a Feb. 1 deadline to send the new budget to Congress. An inclusion of banking fees make sense politically: it demonstrates that the administration is "tough" on Wall Street and also wants to raise revenues to pay off the national debt. The merits of the policy, though, make less sense.

The New York Times' Mary Williams Walsh reports that the Federal Reserve of New York told AIG to withhold information in its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Specifically, the New York Fed thought it wasn't such a hot idea for AIG to tell regulators it was ...

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung does her usual thorough reporting in discerning if the post-Sept. 11 shake-up of the intelligence community is to blame for the attempted Christmas Day terrorist bombing of a plane. DeYoung scrutinizes the newly created National Counterterrorism Center, an agency designed to share the information culled by the 16 (name them!) intelligence agencies. Does NCTC have too much data? Should NCTC defer more to the CIA? Or should NCTC actually be strengthened? Reading the piece reminded me of the New York Times' David Leonhardt's article yesterday on the Federal Reserve.