President Obama is outlining his “scaled back” plan to reshape the financial system Wednesday, said Declan McCullagh in CBS News Econwatch. Thanks to “assiduously” leaked details, we know that he wants the Federal Reserve to have more power, the Office of Thrift Supervision to disappear, and a new Consumer Finance Protection Agency to sprout up among the poorly weeded “crop of regulatory agencies” in Washington.
If, like me, you were hoping that Obama would downsize and rationalize the “alphabet soup of regulators,” said Felix Salmon in Reuters, this plan is “a bust.” There are some good ideas tucked in the proposed overhaul, but the gist of it is that there’s nothing wrong with our financial oversight that can’t be fixed by another layer of bureaucracy.
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