In her role as CFO at Morgan Stanley Porat has been one of the leaders in killing the Dodd-Frank regulations behind closed doors.

I was racking my brain for one final story that sums up this era in politics, the state of our world circa 2012, and I have to give it to this one from a few days ago.

William Bryan Jennings, whose parents obviously hoped for a Progressive populist reformer as a child, grew up to work at Morgan Stanley, and acquire all the sense of entitlement and douchebaggery that goes along with such an occupation (I believe they give that to you at the same time as your parking space). One year ago to the day, on December 21, 2011, Jennings left a Christmas party in New York City, and his town car didn’t show up (#richwhitepeopleproblems). So he hailed a cab to take him to his home in Darien, Connecticut. When he got home, Jennings decided to treat the cab ride like a buyout deal, and trying to negotiate down for a lower fare. This is an executive at Morgan Stanley who didn’t want to pay full fare to get home. The cabbie asked for $204 (Jennings said it was $294). Jennings offered $50 (good negotiating ploy; start low!). At this point I should mention that Jennings makes around $3 million a year.

Maybe Glenn Hadden getting banned from trading will somehow create the long-absent deterrent for financial fraud. But actually putting him in jail would go a bit further.

Millions are no doubt wondering how we know that the government has to reduce deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade. This appears to be the magic number that underlies the budget discussions between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress, and it is widely accepted by Serious People everywhere, but where did this magic number come from?

The ACLU plans to sue Morgan Stanley on behalf of five named plaintiffs (they will seek class action status), for the investment bank’s role in fueling what they view as a discriminatory subprime bubble. In doing so, the ACLU will try to pioneer a new legal strategy, by going after the securitizer of the loans instead of the now-defunct originator.

What you hear from bankers to justify their enormous profits is that they must be obscenely overpaid to ensure the retaining of key talent in the organization. It’s worth pointing out that their own bosses think that’s garbage.

We do not yet have a very good context for the costs of the Libor rate-rigging scandal. We know that derivatives traders gained when they called in favors and had banks set the Libor in ways favorable to their bets. And we know that banks benefited from artificially setting the Libor down during the financial crisis to mask their poor fiscal health. But how did that manifest itself in the real world? The investment bank Morgan Stanley has penciled out an estimate of just the Libor suppression, the artificial rigging of the rate lower during the crisis. This does not take into account the derivative trading. And just on that alone, they come up with about $22 billion in fines.

Dimon is right to believe that derivatives are safe for JPMorgan Chase. He has the Fed and the FDIC to backstop him. And it’s really great that you get to backstop the Fed and the FDIC for him and his gambling habit.

I guess Alan Simpson and his recurring set of bad manners has become too much of a liability to those intrepid grand bargaineers. So he’s been pulled for a reliever. Enter Judd Gregg, himself just out of the Senate.

Morgan Stanley and Facebook are facing scrutiny and potential litigation for how they managed Facebooks Initial Public Offering, and whether they properly disclosed information to investors. But Congress just passed and Obama signed the so-called “JOBS” Act, which allows companies and banks to hide the very IPO information investigators now claim may have been missing or misleading in this case.