The Blog

In an excerpt from my book, The Payoff, released on Monday, I wrote that during the April 2010 debate on whether to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, many Senators just couldn’t seem to comprehend the need to place a cap on bank size. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), for example, as

Neither Mitt Romney and the Republicans nor President Obama and many Democrats favor breaking up the big banks, the best way to prevent another taxpayer bailout after a financial crisis. In last Wednesday’s presidential debate, Governor Romney said the Dodd-Frank Act is “t

Why has President Obama so far avoided responsibility for one of the most notorious failures of his administration, deciding not to pursue potential Wall Street crimes? Because Obama’s negative ads – and Mitt Romney’s own foibles — have successfully defined Romney as the candida

This Thursday, Joe Biden (my former boss and the long-time Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) and then Barack Obama will present their vision for a second term. They’ll do it from Charlotte, North Carolina, where Bank of America has its headquarters. They’ll both likely say t

In yesterday’s Financial Times, former Bush (I) Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady wrote a piece entitled, “We need much simpler rules to rein in the banks.” Mr. Brady argued that “regulation should shift to simplicity, not add more complexity.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, on Febru

Tuesday’s New York Times ran an opinion piece by William B. Harrison, Jr., former Chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan, in which he defends the existence of megabanks. I recognized many of his arguments because I’d heard them two years ago from Wall Street lobbyists when I worked in the U.