US When Barack Obama’s administration first circulated its proposals to reform Wall Street regulation, at their core was a plan to consolidate Washington’s Balkan map of overlapping regulatory agencies. That idea underestimated the power of entrenched interests on Capitol Hill.
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, will next week unveil revised plans, which are likely to include the creation of two new structures on top of the existing alphabet soup of agencies. These will include a “council of regulators” – likely to comprise the heads of the largest agencies – which will oversee the Federal Reserve’s new uber-regulatory role of overseeing systemic risk.
