Just off the heels of watchdog Neil Barofskys’ report that revealed how many banks across the country are misusing the bailout funds that were meant to stimulate lending, two senior Democratic lawmakers have asked President Obama’s administration to put the mechanisms in the place that would make the $700 billion bailout more transparent to the American public.
 
Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Representative Edolphus Towns of New York have led the charge to petition Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to adopt the recommendations issued in the watchdog report. Baucus is the head of the Senate Finance Committee and Towns is the …read more

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called for legislation that would require derivatives to be traded on exchanges or clearinghouses, rather than in over-the-counter (OTC) transactions. This proposed authority over the largely unregulated derivatives multi-trillion-dollar market is aimed at mitigating the systemic risk that contributed to the current global financial crisis. Here are some of the responses to this week’s news.
TheDeal.com identified the stakeholders and explored the politics of derivatives regulation.
The key players here are regulators and payments systems executives around the world, two groups that have long been deeply intertwined and, to the public, mostly invisible. The battlefield has two locales: …read more