If you needed to appeal to one authority on banking regulation, you could do worse than to consult Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the FDIC. And now she’s advocating scrapping the Volcker rule and starting over. She comes at this by looking at the spectacle of MF Global – a brokerage house that would not be covered under the Volcker rule – and asking whether they would be permitted to trade depositor funds on their own account if they were a bank. The answer is far less clear-cut than it should be – and that’s the problem with how the Volcker rule emerged from the sausage grinder of the regulatory apparatus.

A couple weeks ago, we saw the enormous lobby culture massing around swipe fees, the relatively obscure issue that determines where billions of dollars go between banks and retailers. The important thing to start with is that this was already determined through a public process. Last year, Congress held a vote, Dick Durbin got over 60 of his colleagues to support him, the measure survived reconciliation, passed into law, and the Federal Reserve began to implement the rule. The system, therefore, worked. What banks are doing is trying to roll back the clock on the reform. They were paying attention to other matters in FinReg and now they have circled back to this. Because they have money and influence, they think they can just nullify a year’s worth of policymaking.

Warren was the emissary sent to Senate Democrats’ offices to warn them about an imminent recess appointment. Which could be herself.

I enjoyed the 60 Minutes story last night on the mortgage mess, because it actually went beyond robo-signing and touched on some of the more fundamental ways in which banks have committed fraud on state courts. Sheila Bair, in suggesting that individual homeowners could be paid off as a make-good for this trouble, and also suggesting that the banks could somehow cure this problem if they put enough time and effort into this, either displayed a misunderstanding of the issues or a not-very-credible recitation of the Administration line. In fact, some of these things cannot be fixed retroactively. The individual homeowner would have to give up due process rights for a cash payout that would result in them leaving their own home, and I simply don’t know who would agree to such a setup in the real world.

I am definitely looking forward to tonight’s 60 Minutes special on foreclosure fraud. In it, the head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, will call for a cleanup Superfund to cleanse the country of toxic mortgages.

Among the few people in Washington willing to bring up the inconvenient and much ignored foreclosure crisis is Sen. Jeff Merkley. He unveiled an actual plan for fixing the mortgage market Tuesday, and today he writes a letter to the President, pleading with him to wake up and acknowledge the robo-signed, improperly-conveyed-to-the-trust elephant in the room. He wants the President to use the State of the Union to restart this conversation.

I am here in Alexandria VA at an event being put on by FDIC to look at small business lending issues. Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke is a panelist as well as several members of Congress, bankers and of course, a representative from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who represents small business about as much as bin Laden represents U.S. national security interest.

Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is supposedly one of the few at least halfway sensible federal regulators who actually warned about the banks’ risky behavior and maintains a healthy skepticism of the laissez faire ideology that shielded their predatory behavior both before and after it tanked the US and Western economies.

Firedoglake.com founder Jane Hamsher appeared on MSNBC this afternoon with host Cenk Uygur. The topic for discussion was the evolving story that Christina Romer’s resignation as head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers is symptomatic of a larger problem of women not being treated equally within the Obama administration. Hamsher describes how, especially within the White House economic team, women who were right about the economic meltdown are ignored in favor of the men on the team who were “aggressively wrong” in making both the decisions that led to the disaster as well as current decisions that are not improving the situation sufficiently.

The people who don’t want Elizabeth Warren running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have consistently sought other options.