WASHINGTON — In what has become a routine spectacle, financial regulators went to Congress this week and raised objections to major portions of President Obama’s plan to overhaul financial industry rules.
The dissident regulators — senior officials at the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — told the Senate banking committee on Tuesday that the new consumer protection agency the president proposes to transfer some of their authority to would never be as effective as they have been.
But instead of modifying or withdrawing the plan, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, has taken the regulators to task, warning them that they are partly responsible for the economic crisis and that their public objections are playing into the hands of industry groups seeking to kill the plan, officials involved in those discussions said.
Mr. Geithner also told the regulators that if the plan fails in Congress, it will be partly a consequence of their public challenges, which coincide with the views of the banks they supervise.
Mr. Geithner, in a brief interview on Wednesday, said he was confident that Congress in the end would adopt legislation embracing the administration’s core principles. He said it was understandable that the regulators had tried to preserve their jurisdiction over consumer issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/politics/06regulate.html?th&emc=th
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