So you have this crazy circumstance where the payroll tax cut ends up a worse deal for low-income workers, who would spend the money, and a better deal for high-income workers, who probably won’t.

Shahien Nasiripour’s article about Citibank’s near-bankruptcy in November 2008 shows how silly it is to expect safety by creating a “systemic risk council,” one headed, I might add, by Tim Geithner. He basically applies the Potter Stewart principle to systemic risk, saying that he’ll know it when he sees it. And somehow, I’d guess that he’ll see systemic risk in any big bank that goes down.

Tim Geithner has changed his tune somewhat, backing a bill that would clarify the Treasury’s right to allow Hardest Hit Fund grant money to be used for foreclosure legal aid, but it’s unclear whether there’s enough time in the end of the legislative session to get this done.

A month ago, Brad Miller and a dozen other Congressmen — including House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank — wrote the Financial Stability Oversight Council to ask that they look into the systemic dangers of foreclosure fraud. Timmeh Geithner just responded to that letter. His response makes it clear he actually read Miller’s letter — because he references the first item I’ve laid out above, though rather than actually respond to that request, he describes what the FSOC is actually doing instead of examining collateral loan files. His response to the second and third requests is even more insolent; he refuses to even repeat the second one, and rather than consider either one seriously, he just says FSOC will take action “if abuses are found.”

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.

Now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been created, everyone is waiting for Obama to nominate someone to head it. The longer this drags on, it becomes a less a question of “Who?” and more a question of “Why not Elizabeth Warren?”

That’s a question that the Obama White House does NOT want to answer.

It does appear that Elizabeth Warren has the inside track to getting the position as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A source tells FDL News that Geithner is working on setting up CFPB with Elizabeth Duke, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Duke is a former community banker and the past head of the American Bankers Association, a trade lobby group. She served on the ABA’s board of directors from 1999 to 2006. The ABA opposed the Dodd-Frank bill almost entirely because of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Felix Salmon says that Elizabeth Warren is a shoo-in for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not because of any inside knowledge he has, but because progressives have turned up the heat so much to make it too painful for the Administration not to nominate her.

I’m a bit more skeptical about it than Salmon, but it’s true that progressives organized around the Warren nomination in ways that I wish they would have at some points in the FinReg fight. It speaks well that advocates have understood the importance of the regulators writing the rules as much as, if not more than, Congress granting the authority.

Thirty-nine Democrats, including a substantial portion of the House Financial Services Committee, have signed on to a letter distributed by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) supporting Elizabeth Warren to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will come into being as part of the financial reform bill to be signed today by the President. Warren, a favorite of progressives, invented the concept of a federal consumer protection agency for financial products, yet some reports with anonymous sources say top officials at the White House are resisting naming her to be the first director of the agency.

I don’t think that increasing fees and ripping off customers are the only sources of big bank revenue – they have the carry trade, making billions off the difference in interest between what they can get from the discount window and what they can loan out. And they are still engaging in plenty of risky activities like high-frequency and derivative trading. But certainly, fees and bad loan contracts still exist. And it would be the CFPB’s mandate to stamp them out.