Emily Flitter

The House Financial Services Committee approved a bill 43 to 26 on Thursday designed to regulate derivatives after last minute additions that will cut into industry profits on such contracts.

Tired of hearing warnings that a new consumer financial products agency will hurt your local florist? Eliot Spitzer has a solution. He thinks you should complain to your pension fund or mutual fund about it.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank unexpectedly sought Wednesday to toughen a bill to regulate derivatives, pushing an amendment that would require many major financial institutions to trade their derivatives contracts over exchanges.

The House Financial Services Committee is scheduled Wednesday to begin debating the first two pieces of regulatory reform, and its vote will set a crucial marker before the chamber's final negotiations.

Another draft bill to regulate over-the-counter derivatives emerged Friday, adding a wrinkle to the contentious debate over mandatory central clearing.

Observers of financial regulatory reform have pronounced the effort to get new legislation passed this year pretty much dead. Even Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair doesn’t think it’s going to happen before the end of 2009. But Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is pushing ahead with all of the urgency—and confidence—in the world. This week (shortened by the Columbus Day holiday Monday) could see the first legislation relating to the Obama administration’s regulatory reform proposals reported out of the Financial Services Committee. But there are probably quite a few people who say they’ll only believe it when it happens.</

A House Small Business subcommittee approved a package of reforms Thursday that would expand government-backed lending to small businesses and seek to streamline the government's role.

Thanks to provisions in Tarp and the stimulus package, one man—the pay czar—gets a say on what bankers at firms receiving government aid get paid. But who is this pay czar? A moral grandstander like Eliot Spitzer? An Obama insider? As it turns out, Kenneth Feinberg is neither of those things.

Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is trying hard to convince Congress not to leave too wide a loophole in derivatives regulation, and his performance yesterday was itself a point towards his argument.

JPMorgan Chase’s Heidi Miller has made it clear that, when it comes to bankers’ pay, she won’t accept Congress’ populist pandering anymore. Miller, who is the chief executive of JPMorgan’s Treasury and securities services division, told attendees of U.S. Banker’s 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking dinner last night of an encounter she had with an unnamed member of Congress that left her “shocked” and “deeply depressed.”

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair predicted that reform of the financial services system would likely not be completed this year, but said that was not necessarily a bad thing.

A House Financial Services Committee version of a bill to regulate derivatives would allow banks and others more leeway to use derivatives for hedging purposes without sending them through a clearing house.

A regulatory drive to force large, systemically risky banks to issue "contingent capital," a new type of instrument that allows institutions to quickly convert debt to equity under stressful circumstances, is gaining momentum.

The stimulus bill thrust the Small Business Administration back into the spotlight and its new administrator is determined to make sure it stays there.

WASHINGTON — The number of high-priced loans declined overall in 2008, but the share of those loans going to black and Hispanic borrowers rose, according to data released Wednesday by federal regulators.

So-called "special-purpose entities" are not inherently dangerous, according to a report released Tuesday.

Ann Minch decided she’d had enough of Bank of America after the bank notified her it was raising her credit card’s interest rate to 30%--for no apparent reason. So she made a video and posted it on Youtube inviting viewers to join her in a “debtors’ revolt.”

ICBA Now on iTunesSome may view the financial crisis as a pile of lemons, but the Independent Community Bankers of America appears determined to make lemonade by using it to gain leverage over the largest banks.

This is a season of throwbacks: Economists claim the U.S. is experiencing the biggest downturn since the 1930s and now there’s art to match that comparison. A new Web site launched by the Independent Community Bankers of America hearkens to pre-war caricatures of greedy big bankers in its quest to promote the virtues of community banks.

This week is going to be another tough one for the Federal Reserve’s relations with Congress, as a second hearing in the House Financial Services Committee potentially gives air to members’ trepidation over more Fed power. Elsewhere, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is expected to release new mortgage metrics. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, delayed these past two weeks, could finally emerge as well.