Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Watchdog's fate in Senate key to financial reform

WASHINGTON - JUNE 09:  Elizabeth Warren, Chair...

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Reuters

The tag on U.S. financial regulation reform may as well say "Made on Wall Street" if bank lobbyists manage to gut the Obama administration's proposed consumer watchdog agency, said Elizabeth Warren on Monday.

The head of a panel monitoring the government's bank bailout program, Warren is a Harvard Law School professor and a fierce critic of the banking industry. She is also rumored to be front-runner to become the first chief of President Barack Obama's proposed U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

The CFPA would be a new government regulator devoted to shielding Americans from financial rip-offs like the abusive subprime mortgages at the core of the 2008 financial crisis, and the prolonged recession and bank bailouts that followed.

But the proposed agency, already pared back last month in the House of Representatives, is in trouble in the Senate.

Watchdog's fate in Senate key to financial reform

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