Within one week Republicans are going to grab the national spotlight on two huge issues that should be the realm of the party who stands up for the little guy. That party used to be the Democratic party. How can they let this happen?

On Friday, at the CPAC convention, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher is going to call for breaking up the big banks in the wake of a failed Dodd-Frank bill.

It goes without saying that you should not weep for the banking industry. In the years following a Great Recession they caused, they still manage to churn out record profits. This is the 13th straight quarterly rise in profits for financial institutions.

Schapiro’s replacement matters. Simon Johnson kicked this off a few days ago, juxtaposing the bona fides of Treasury Department under secretary for domestic finance Mary Miller (a former mutual fund executive) against former Special Inspector General for TARP Neil Barofsky. There’s no question than an experienced prosecutor like Barofsky would change the SEC’s culture, but there’s almost no chance he will ever hold another job in Washington, as he was specifically told by Herb Allison right at the beginning of his book Bailout.

I don’t know why I felt so insulted by Ben Bernanke’s housing speech yesterday, but it really stuck with me. Probably because he managed to give an entire speech on housing – one that at points implicitly blamed homeowners for their predicaments – without mentioning the word “fraud.” Or saying “I’m sorry.”

It was very much a forward-looking rather than backward-looking speech. But he describes the foreclosure crisis as the prime contributor to the Great Recession without bothering to mention that his agency had oversight responsibility over the mortgage market throughout the inflation of the housing bubble. The Greenspan Fed rejected consumer protection or regulation of any kind as a matter of ideology. And Bernanke wasn’t about to let that fact be known to the Operation HOPE audience. In fact, his message was that originators aren’t writing ENOUGH loans at this point

Among the other goodies in store for America in the lame duck Congress is a bid to gut financial regulatory and other agencies and set up a process to take away their independent control and subsume them under the power of the executive. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, under the direction of outgoing chair Joe Lieberman, plans to pass the Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act, S.3468, out of committee and into a fast track process. Mark Warner, Susan Collins and Rob Portman are the drives forces behind it. Americans for Financial Reform and other groups have raised alarms about it.

The need to offer a substitute to placate those desiring a public option created this Frankenstein monster, which was admittedly not well thought-out. Those who did it ended up with the worst of all possible worlds; no public option supporter really even knew about these multi-state plans, and they have the potential to disrupt the exchanges and cause a race to the bottom.

Jeff Connaughton has authored a powerful, and chilling insider’s perspective on the financial crisis and the pathetic governmental response to it. The second part of his title sums up the result and the first half explains why Wall Street always wins. Many, perhaps most Americans are likely to agree with both parts of Connaughton’s title so this book will not transform the public’s view of the issues. The public largely has this set of issues correct. Connaughton gives the readers unique access to the facts because he had a front row seat to many of the key discussions and he has the analytical abilities and expertise to explain the significance of those facts.

FHA’s balance sheet is currently in a precarious position, but CAP argues that the expansion of that balance sheet, which now totals $1.1 trillion, helped keep credit flowing since the collapse of the bubble. “Home prices would have plummeted even further, households would have lost much more wealth than they already did during the crisis, and even more families would have lost their homes to foreclosure,” the paper claims. CAP further alleges that FHA will not require a sustained injection of public funds to keep going (through a standing line of credit it holds with the US Treasury but has never tapped), as the mortgages it insured in recent years look to be profitable. And even if FHA did need to pull funds from the line of credit, that would represent a solid investment for taxpayers, given the support that FHA provided the economy.

JPMorgan Chase clearly wants to sell out its former traders and confine the blame to them. I never look a gift prosecution of corrupt bankers in the mouth, but the law stipulates that the top executives, including Jamie Dimon, are responsible for any fraudulent valuations delivered to shareholders. Period. Sarbanes-Oxley makes this incredibly simple. But JPMorgan has tossed the government a few bad (and small) minnows, and the government has so far taken the bait.

The IMF has released a new study showing that, in essence, the world would be a much safer place if international banks stopped trading in the financial markets.