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...policy matter, Kaufman's prediction is heavily debated among economists. But as politics, his critique threatens to undermine the White House's finely tuned election-year story line. To hear President Obama or his aides tell it, the coming Senate debate on financial regulatory reform will offer a clear choice to voters this fall between most Democrats who are defending the interests of Main Street and most Republicans who are in the pocket of Wall Street. Kaufman, by contrast, argues that neither party has yet shown much seriousness about undoing decades of deregulation, and nonregulation, that created the conditions...
...Little in these reforms is really new," Kaufman says of the current White House-backed Democratic Banking Committee plan. He calls the provisions for new "resolution authority" to dissolve failing banks "an illusion," since the sheer size of the institutions makes painless, prepackaged liquidation unlikely. He worries about loopholes that exempt certain highly profitable derivatives from federal oversight. But most of all, he believes the current Senate plan, which relies on the wisdom of bank regulators, won't prevent another crisis. "The sad reality is that regulators had substantial powers," he announced during another Senate-floor speech in March...
...White House has mostly avoided direct public engagement with its unlikely critic. On ABC's This Week recently, White House economic aide Larry Summers dodged a question about Kaufman's complaints. "Senator Kaufman is exactly right," he said instead, sympathizing with the concern about large bank failures. In fact, on whether to dismantle the largest banks, it would be hard for the two men to disagree more...
...what he calls the "great regulatory meltdown" of the past two decades, a move that was largely endorsed by Summers when he served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. But the Senator has been careful to avoid criticizing Democrats directly. He says he has not talked with the White House - or former boss Biden - about these issues and has only words of praise for Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, a onetime champion of deregulation who wrote the Banking Committee bill. "We just have a very different view," he says. (See the top 10 political gaffes...
...earlier that morning, and shortly after that, three car bombs had exploded outside embassies in the capital. "You are bad luck," he said with a laugh. It was our inside joke ever since January, when his father and I were nearly blown up after a suicide bomber in a white minibus detonated himself outside a hotel we had just entered...