Law and regulation

Lawmakers split Tuesday on whether the regulatory reform bill should include a "financial crisis responsibility fee" charged on the largest institutions.

After more than a week of escalating partisan rhetoric over regulatory reform, Senate Republican leaders significantly changed their tone on Tuesday, suggesting a bipartisan bill was now within reach.

Seeking to win Republican votes for regulatory reform legislation, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and other Democrats suggested Monday that they are open to eliminating a proposed $50 billion resolution fund for systemically important institutions.

As lawmakers continue to spar over regulatory reform legislation, a separate push to charge the largest banks a "financial crisis responsibility fee" is gaining momentum.

More than 18 months after the largest bank failure in U.S. history, regulators of the collapsed Washington Mutual Inc. faced a day of reckoning Friday, with a key lawmaker accusing them of gross incompetence.

The political pressure to enact financial reform intensified Friday as the government accused Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of defrauding investors and the Senate concluded two days of hearings highlighting the assertedly lax supervision that preceded the largest bank failure in the country's history.

The financial powerhouse allowed a short-selling hedge fund to help structure a product it then sold to investors, the SEC announced.

A lawmaker and a Treasury Department official Thursday pushed for a permanent extension of the Build America Bond program, but acknowledged that the greatest obstacle is finding a way to pay for it.

Database would give the SEC details on each trade

The Securities and Exchange Commission task force on hedge funds, buyout funds and mutual funds is looking to hire five fund managers, chief operating officers or executives with “direct exposure to trading and operations,” according to a help-wanted ad it placed last month.

The Office of Thrift Supervision was more focused on blocking the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from reining in Washington Mutual Inc. than it was in regulating the thrift company itself, congressional investigators and two watchdogs said Thursday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, who recently caused a stir in the municipal bond market by proposing a tax-reform bill that would eliminate tax-exempt bonds and replace them with tax-credit bonds, said yesterday he is open to discussing possible modifications to the legislation with critics.

While the subject continues to be hotly contested, at least one regulator, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, is satisfied that the pending regulatory reform bill would put eila Bair, is satisfied that the pending regulatory reform bill would put a stop to government bailouts.

Republicans and Democrats escalated the rhetorical war over regulatory reform on Wednesday, with each side accusing the other of playing politics.

Over the past few months, the Obama administration has gradually backed away from providing a near-term plan for Fannie and Freddie after missing a self-set February deadline.

One defendant claimed he didn’t know his associate’s last name because “you do not ask a comrade for a last name.”

Democrats and Republicans escalated the war of words over regulatory reform on Tuesday, with the GOP saying the current bill is unacceptable and the White House objecting to any compromise.

Four years after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. launched an elaborate deposit insurance pricing system, the agency has gone back to the drawing board.

Regulator calls for tracking individual loans to increase transparency of private deals.

Speaking Monday in Washington to a conference of the Council of Institutional Investors, Bair also reiterated her agency's hopes to tie a bank's compensation structure to its deposit insurance rate.