Law and regulation

For every answer international regulators give on a requirement for a large bank capital surcharge, it just feels like more questions pop up.

The Expect Miracles Foundation, formerly Mutual Funds Against Cancer, raised $1 million at its annual East Coast Classic at Pinehills Gold Club and Indian Pond Country Club.

It turns out banks are reluctant to help dig their own graves. In letters to federal regulators, several institutions said they remain worried about a requirement that they submit a "living will" outlining how best to dismantle them in a crisis.

The Financial Planning Coalition, a group that includes several organizations representing thousands of financial advisors, this week released a copy of a petition it sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, asking the regulatory agency to extend the definition of fiduciary standard to include “anyone providing personalized investment advice to retail clients.”

The hand-wringing over bank capital levels is pulling the spotlight off a bigger issue: effective oversight of the largest firms. In the wake of the crisis, regulators have forced banks to hold both a higher level and a higher quality of capital. They've created a tangle of complicated rules.

Responding to frustrated lawmakers who have yet to see the Obama administration give out any funds from its $30 billion small business lending program, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday the fault lay with the banking regulators.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. convened some of the best banking-policy minds on the planet Tuesday to look at how best the agency can use its new powers to unwind a large, systemically important bank.

While international regulators continue to spar over the right size of a proposed capital surcharge for the largest banks, the U.S. banking agencies are disagreeing among themselves on the issue.

Nearly three years since the financial crisis began, lawmakers appear consumed again with a very precrisis topic: Is overregulation driving financial institutions overseas?

Two years after proposing rules to avert misuse of client assets on the scale of the Madoff ponzi scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed amendments that would strengthen oversight of broker-dealer audits.

The question of whether some banks are still "too big to fail" will not be settled until the next crisis. That, in a nutshell, was the takeaway from a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, where lawmakers fought with each other over whether the Dodd-Frank Act adequately addressed the problem.

When Congress threatened to cap the interchange fees that banks collect on debit card transactions, the industry argued that such a move would force it to kill off its own debit rewards programs. As it turns out, the demise of those programs might inconvenience consumers but it is unlikely to deal banks much of a financial blow.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon's scolding of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had broad support among bankers reeling from a re-defeat on the Durbin amendment and renewed anxieties about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. With "300 rules coming," as Dimon lamented, there are plenty of things for bankers to hate.

Bankers lost the Senate fight over interchange fees, but they are hoping the vote will help convince the Federal Reserve Board to raise its proposed 12-cent cap.

The Treasury Department has swapped the carrot for the stick for three of the largest participants in the administration's foreclosure prevention program.

Although banks failed in their attempt to convince Congress to delay an interchange fee cap for debit cards, the financial services industry is not giving up, just changing venues.

Banks appeared to be gaining the upper hand in their battle against retailers to delay pending interchange fee caps, but the fight was far from over.

Depending on which political party you talk to, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is either the most powerful federal agency ever created, or the most constrained.

Even after an embarrassing online porn scandal rocked the regulatory agency last year, a new report from SEC Inspector General David Kotz finds some staffers are still going to great lengths to access these racy sites on company time.

Since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that he will terminate the QE2 program in mid-June, what will become of the bull market that saw the S&P 500 nearly double from its 2009 lows?