Academic

The WSJ has a big piece on how Geithner's going to manage financial reform, and the news is that it has a deadline: before the end of the year, Congress would pass the bill.  HT: Clusterstock.

The bottom line about reform is that the administration decided to do incremental things, presumably because it was more interested in cap and trade and health care.  Larry Cunningham and I have a paper that suggests there is some merit in the incremental approach - if you like the SEC, it hasn't been abolished, if you believe in regulatory competition it has been preserved, and so on.

One part of regulatory competition that would go away is that between the thrift and the bank regulator.  Neither of them is happy about it, as the Journal notes - and also note that both of these witness are direct subordinates of Geithner:

"We see no reason for the government to incur the cost of changing the 146-year-old name of the agency as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency," OCC Director John Dugan said in his prepared remarks. The Obama administration's proposal calls for a merger of the OCC and the Office of Thrift Supervision, creating a new "National Bank Supervisor."

But even such a merger should still be an open question, OTS Acting Director John Bowman said.

"The OTS did not regulate the largest banks that failed; the OTS regulated the largest banks that were allowed to fail," Mr. Bowman said in his remarks.

Sometimes, regulatory turf protection trumps the organizational chart.