Finance Space

The betting is that Congress will pass a financial regulatory reform bill.

It’s hard to claim — as some in the financial industry do — that, almost two years after the system’s near collapse, Congress is moving with undue haste. One might hope that out of this slow, deliberative process would emerge a finely tuned bill, weighing the benefits of regulation with potential costs.

But this delay was the financial industry’s strategy. It hoped that with an economic recovery, calls for reform would fade and it could return to business as usual.

As the economy continues to worsen, more people are turning to bad-credit loans to get instant cash to cover bills. There are some things to look out for, according to credit expert Gerri Detweiler.

Detweiler, warned consumers last week of scams concerning lenders who promise to give you a loan despite your credit history. “We’ve heard after the fact from consumers who lost hundreds, or thousands of dollars, to these low-life lenders who will steal the very last dime of desperate borrowers,” she said.

The Obama administration plans to begin a public debate next month on how best to overhaul Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the nation’s housing finance system.

Officials say they will proceed with reform based, in part, on the principles that borrowers should be able to get home loans even during periods of economic distress and that low-income people should not be excluded from financing to buy homes.

The Fed to Congress: Don’t take away our small banks.

Top Federal Reserve officials are waging a public campaign to persuade lawmakers that their long-standing authority to regulate banks around the country – including small and mid-size ones – is integral to keeping the central bank attuned what is going on across the U.S. economy.

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke articulated that message Saturday morning in a speech to the Independent Community Bankers of America in which he argued that the Fed is better able to monitor the U.S. economy because of its role overseeing 5,000 bank holding companies and 850 state-chartered banks around the country.

This week Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) unveiled a financial regulation overhaul bill that omits an important issue to convenience and petroleum retailers, consumers and small businesses in general: credit and debit card interchange (or “swipe”) fee reform.

Last year, Dodd announced his intention to draft legislation addressing the country’s outrageous interchange fees. It seemed to many that the broad financial overhaul bill would be a natural home for the swipe fee fix.

Retail groups in Washington, while disappointed that this issue was left out of the legislation, expressed a strong desire to work with Dodd and members of the Senate Banking Committee to address swipe fee reform.

Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd must pitch lawmakers Monday to support a bill aimed at overhauling America’s complex web of financial regulation.

Combining Obama administration and Republican priorities, the leading Senate author of a sweeping rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations is looking for consensus with a proposal that neither side of the political spectrum is ready to embrace.

The bill trumpeted by the chairman of the Senate banking committee will reportedly expand the powers of the Federal Reserve and create a consumer protection entity with less authority than President Barack Obama initially demanded.

The head of a key banking panel is expected Monday to release a draft bill of sweeping regulatory changes aimed at warding off future collapses in the financial system.

While much of the attention has focused on battles over the creation of a new consumer regulator to ensure consumers get a fair shake with mortgages and credit cards, the final draft is expected to address other areas, including some lawmakers generally agree about.

Senate Banking chief Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said Thursday that the “single most important thing we do in this bill” will be creating a new mechanism to prevent firms from becoming so big that their failure would threaten the entire financial system, spurring another universally hated $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Democrats said on Thursday that they would go it alone in an effort to pass an overhaul of financial regulation, increasing the likelihood of a bitter partisan showdown, Sewell Chan reports in The New York Times.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said he would put forward his own bill on Monday, despite the lack of a single Republican endorsement. Democrats concluded that bipartisan talks were not making enough progress and that going their own way was the only realistic hope of getting the legislation adopted in an election year, he said.

The trans-Atlantic ambitions of Barclays, the British bank, are moving to another level. Barclays became a big player on Wall Street by snapping up Lehman Brothers’ American operations after the firm collapsed in September 2008. The revelation that it is interested in buying a United States bank suggests it wants to become a familiar face on America’s Main Street, too.

The Federal Reserve has terminated nearly all of the extraordinary lending programs it created in 2007 and 2008 to combat the credit crisis. But it now faces critical decisions in coming months about when and how to tighten monetary policy, according to two Fed officials.

The officials — Brian P. Sack, the executive vice president who oversees the trading desk at Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Charles L. Evans, president of the Chicago Fed — spoke this week at an economic policy conference here sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics, Sewell Chan reports in The New York Times.