WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill to tighten financial regulation ground to a halt in the Senate on Friday, casting one of the top domestic policy priorities of the Obama administration in a stark political light. After months of public debate and closed-door talks, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, the Democrats' chief negotiator, said he has been unable ...

FINANCIAL INNOVATION UNDER FIRE

Leave it to Wall Street to give innovation a bad name. Americans prize out-of-the-box thinking in technology and culture, but they fear it in finance--understandably, thanks to innovative disasters like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and "negatively amortizing" mortgages whose principal grows instead of shrinking.
In spite of the public's mistrust, entrepreneurs and academics ...

AConsumer Watchdog report on the financial industry’s efforts to neuter the financial reform bill in Congress, and the Senate Banking committee in particular, finds the sector gave $41 million to committee members since 2005 and spent $336 million lobbying Congress in the first three quarters of 2009. Some ...

The Center for Responsible Lending has taken a calculator to tally up the costs to the U.S. economy of what it calls "bad lending;" everything from subprime mortgages, to abusive bank policies, to payday loans. The group has added a section to its Web site where consumers can see these ...