Believe it or not, there is a bill in Washington to break up the Too Big To Fail banks. Sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) the Brown-Vitter bill would break up the Megabanks by requiring higher capital reserves. Not surprisingly Wall Street is not pleased.

Bad news for Wall Street. A Senator Tim Johnson announces his retirement the Senate Banking Committee Chairmanship may fall to one of Wall Street’s biggest enemies, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew made a stunning and fantastic claim at his confirmation hearing, namely that the Too Big To Fail or systemic risk threat from the mega banks no longer existed. That the problem had been solved by the Dodd-Frank legislation.

Seriously.

Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew went before the Senate Finance Committee today for his confirmation hearing. The hearing was mostly deferential with Lew finding considerable agreement with the Republicans on the committee, particularly on trade and corporate tax policy, but Lew did face questions over his bonuses at Citigroup and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.

Pam has already touched on David Freedlander’s piece about the decline of independent blogs 10 years down the road. There are many things that are true in his long piece, but he somehow doesn’t manage to ask the rather obvious question — where’s the money?

Tonight, millions of Americans will settle in for a debate between a fresh-faced prodigy from Middle America with a lot of Big Ideas (not to mention cat food hot dish recipes), go head to head with a tired Washington Insider with an admittedly undisciplined mouth. But only one of them is a douchebag.

Greg Sargent has an interesting by-product of the electoral debate over China, and particularly Chinese currency manipulation. Romney has used this as part of his five-point plan to improve the US economy. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) casually points out that there’s a bill on the table awaiting a vote in the House that would deal with the issue:

On financial regulatory issues, Republicans have recently retreated back to the idea that all we need to do is to ensure adequate capital requirements at the largest banks. If they can handle anything that comes across with their own reserves, then taxpayer money is secure and the free market can sort out everything else.

I don’t think it was too much of a surprise that today’s hearing with Jamie Dimon was something less than stringent. Very few Senators bothered to show up with anything more than a list of questions and a pallid expression. The very structure of the hearing, with one round of five minutes of questioning, wasn’t conducive to being very meaningful. But there were still a few interesting moments.

Jamie Dimon testifies before the Senate Banking Committee tomorrow, and this Bloomberg report alleges that he was personally responsible for keeping regulators at bay from the chief investment office, the one responsible for all the Fail Whale losses, which could reach past $5 billion at this point.