Word: reform
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President Obama's new proposals to crack down on Wall Street - first the new tax on big banks last week, then Thursday's new restrictions on big banks - signal a somewhat new approach to financial reform. But they also signal a very new approach to politics and governing: more populist, more confrontational, less deferential to Congress, less eager for common ground. His uncharacteristically blunt message to financial giants and their political defenders said it all: "If these folks want a fight, it's a fight I'm ready to have...
...real message behind all the bank-bashing is that Obama is shifting gears for his second year in office. Instead of calling for general reforms and letting Congress work out the details, he wants to draw bright lines and force lawmakers to choose sides: Do you want to reform the financial system after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression or do you want to protect the status quo on Wall Street? After cobbling together 60 Senators for health reform through endless delays and deals - which thanks to Brown would now require cooperation from at least one Republican along...
...stood next to Obama as the President described the proposed ban on proprietary trading by commercial banks as "the Volcker rule." Other White House economic aides have also chafed at the influence of Geithner and Summers; one of them recently told me that if I wanted to understand financial reform, I should talk to MIT's Simon Johnson, who until last week was trashing the Administration's reforms as a cave-in to Wall Street. (See 10 things that have and haven't changed during Obama's first year...
...much more populist are-you-with-us-or-the-banks tone in 2010. Axelrod and Obama aide Valerie Jarrett met at the White House on Wednesday with Harvard law professor and TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the mother of the stand-alone consumer-agency proposal and an outspoken advocate for reform; their message was that they'd welcome a fight with Wall Street...
...part of that pivot, then, is to say, "How are we going to make sure that we squeeze every ounce of value out of every dollar that we spend?" We began that process with Pentagon reform. And the victories that [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates helped win are ones that this town completely discounted when we started. We are scrubbing the budget once again to make sure that every program that we're funding actually has some justification - it actually works. Yesterday we had a whole bunch of CEOs and innovators here to talk about modernization of government. The infrastructure...