Banks Rally to Fight New Rules

We may no longer be able to trust the banks with the economy, but the good news is they’re still working hard at what they’ve always done best: influencing the government. The New York Times reports that “The nine biggest participants in the derivatives market—including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America—created a lobbying organization, the CDS Dealers Consortium, on Nov. 13, a month after five of its members accepted federal bailout money.” Now Washington and Wall Street are suiting up for battle over the regulation of the derivatives market, in a reprisal of the fight that Wall Street won ten years ago. Paul Krugman, meanwhile, returns to the financial crisis in the Times and goes for the Republican jugular: “the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn—the turn that made crisis inevitable—took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.”