One of the stories that I did was looking at the House Financial Services Committee and how seats on that committee .. It’s sometimes called the “money committee” or the “cash committee” because it draws more money from lobbying and from corporate players that any other committee because it is the committee that regulates Wall Street; and so freshmen are put on that committee because it’s a great way for them to raise a lot of money quickly and to defend their seat after their first term. As a member of Congress you are most vulnerable, after you’ve gotten elected, in your second election and if you win your second election, unless you do something really bad or there’s a major change in the politics of the United States, you’re pretty safe, so Freshmen are put on Financial Services because they want to quickly raise money.
.. The freshmen who are on financial services who are busy raising money from Wall Street, most of them went along with the provisions that would change Dodd Frank (and ease restrictions on the banks). The more senior members by and large Democrats ,along with the administration spoke out against … (voted against)
.. There’s intense pressure on them to raise money but they must raise money from the same world that they are supposedly regulating. And so how do you you raise money from Wall Street and yet at the same time be tough on them? And so if you look at some of the votes that they’ve taken the folks that under the most pressure to raise money tend to be the folks that are voting in favor of the legislation that the lobbyist on Wall Street are pushing.
(31 -34 min)
Citigroup Hires Mr. Inside
Few banks can use advice about navigating the federal government more than Citigroup, a company so hobbled by the crisis that it has essentially become a ward of the state, kept alive through multiple infusions of taxpayer funds.
Still, people inside and outside the bank say they were stunned when Richard D. Parsons, Citigroup’s chairman, enlisted the services last spring of Richard F. Hohlt, a longtime Washington insider with a history of aggressive advocacy for the banking industry.
Critics say that as a top lobbyist for the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, Mr. Hohlt blocked regulation of these institutions and played a pivotal role helping to prolong dubious industry practices that cost taxpayers $150 billion to clean up.
After that crisis passed, he faded from the public eye but continued advising clients, cementing his contacts in the news media and even surfacing as one among a handful of Washington insiders involved in the public outing of Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. agent.
.. But two people briefed on Mr. Hohlt’s engagement with Citigroup, who requested anonymity because speaking publicly about the situation would jeopardize their jobs, say Mr. Hohlt was also hired to advise Mr. Parsons on ways to blunt the demands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the bank’s primary regulators. The F.D.I.C. agreed to insure some $300 billion of Citigroup’s troubled assets in a loss-sharing arrangement last year and has been at loggerheads with the bank’s management over stewardship of the sprawling enterprise.
Mr. Hohlt said that it was a “fabrication” that he was hired to jockey with the F.D.I.C. “I’ve never contacted anybody at the F.D.I.C.,” he said.
.. Two former officials, a banking regulator and an under secretary of the Treasury, said they banned Mr. Hohlt from their offices. “He wasn’t my style,” said Richard T. Pratt, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board president in the early 1980s. “He was very aggressive I thought, kind of the caricature of a lobbyist.”
How Wall St. got its way
But last month the Fed’s top lawyer delivered a particularly blunt critique that proved golden to the industry.
“You can tell that was written at 2:30 in the morning and so that needs to be I think revisited just to make sense of it,” Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez said at an American Bar Association conference in Washington.
All that was left was for the provision to survive the horse trading between House and Senate appropriators during final budget talks.
During these negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.\
Officials at both agencies have complained they are woefully underfunded and it is compromising their ability to carry out their Dodd-Frank responsibilities and to effectively police financial markets.
The fiscal 2015 spending package would increase the CFTC budget by $35 million to $250 million and the SEC’s budget by $150 million to $1.5 billion.