'Failed' Wall Street means biggest rules rewrite since 1930s

Camden Fine’s nightmare is a Bank of America or Citibank branch on every corner.

“Do we really want to create more cycloptic monsters stomping around the country ruining people’s lives?” asks Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America. He says he fears new US financial regulation might include a merger of agencies favoring big banks over his 5,000 members.

Robert Greifeld, on the other hand, sees his Nasdaq OMX Group benefiting if a restructuring of Wall Street’s rules steers more business to the exchange’s clearinghouse for interest-rate swaps. That would also reduce profits for private derivative traders, said Greifeld, the group’s chief executive officer. In coming months, President Barack Obama and Congress will pick winners and losers in tackling the biggest overhaul in financial regulation since Franklin D Roosevelt and Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s. It’s part of the price the industry must pay after a $700 billion bank bailout.

“The present system has been broken; it’s failed the test of the marketplace,” former Federal Reserve Chairman PaulVolcker said January 15 in New York in calling for strengthening regulation. Volcker, an Obama adviser, is scheduled to testify Wednesday at a Senate hearing on the subject.