On Huffington Post, Elizabeth Warren says we have a new fox guarding the hen house when it comes to financial regulation. Now, I have political opinions and will discuss them if asked, but that is not really the point of this blog. Here I am most interested in whether the financial reforms instituted after the 2007/8 meltdown are actually working, or whether the system is headed for an even more catastrophic meltdown. It’s not encouraging to think that the banks may be practically writing their own regulations:

Soon after they crashed the economy and got tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, the biggest Wall Street banks started lobbying Congress to head off any serious financial regulation. Public Citizen and the Center for Responsive Politics found that in 2009 alone, the financial services sector employed 1,447 former federal employees to carry out their lobbying efforts, swarming all over Congress. And who were their top lobbyists? Members of Congress — in fact, 73 former Members of Congress.

According to a report by the Institute for America’s Future, by the following year, the six biggest banks employed 243 lobbyists who once worked in the federal government, including 33 who had worked as chiefs of staff for members of Congress and 54 who had worked as staffers for the banking oversight committees in the Senate or the House.