One year after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Congress is still debating new financial regulations to protect consumers and prevent risk-taking in the financial sector. The House Committee on Financial Services is currently undertaking the important first step of writing, amending and voting on some of the pieces of the long-proposed financial regulatory reform. While debating these issues top committee members have been the recipients of disproportionate campaign contributions from the very industry that they are tasked with regulating.

Twenty-seven committee members have so far received over one-quarter of their contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector. This includes Chair Barney Frank, Ranking Member Spencer Bachus, four subcommittee chairs and four subcommittee ranking members. Of the twenty-seven, twelve committee members received over 35% of their contributions in 2009 from the FIRE sector. All contribution data was collected from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org.

Ranking Member Bachus, a crucial decision maker on the committee, received 71% of his campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector so far this year. (These numbers run from January 1-June 30.) For his career, the Alabama congressman receives 45% of his contributions from the FIRE sector. Bachus leads the committee in his reliance on FIRE sector campaign contributions. Bachus has taking a position in opposition to most of the regulatory reforms. Bachus recently stated in a hearing, "this is absolutely the wrong time to be creating a new government agency empowered not only to ration credit, but to design the financial products offered to consumers."

Top Recipients of FIRE Campaign Contributions by % (2009)
Name	Party	FIRE Contributions	Total Contributions	Percentage
Spencer Bachus	R	$161,200	$226,930	71.04%
Kenny Marchant	R	$25,000	$46,043	54.30%
Paul Kanjorski	D	$215,200	$397,215	54.18%
Greg Meeks	D	$114,900	$218,340	52.62%
Mike Castle	R	$104,000	$200,027	51.99%
Dennis Moore	D	$139,097	$275,480	50.49%
Mel Watt	D	$23,000	$50,696	45.37%
Melissa Bean	D	$269,800	$634,535	42.52%
Ed Royce	R	$200,635	$504,418	39.78%
Randy Neugebauer	R	$146,810	$384,205	38.21%
Jeb Hensarling	R	$140,660	$371,731	37.84%
Nydia Velazquez	D	$58,100	$164,750	35.27%
View the bar chart

Pennsylvania Rep. Paul Kanjorski is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises and is tasked with crafting many of the initial bills for the proposed financial regulatory reform. While undertaking this important work Kanjorski has had enough time to raise large sums for his reelection. Of the $397,215 that Kanjorski has raised in 2009, 54% of it comes from the FIRE sector. For his career, Kanjorski received 44% of his contributions from the FIRE sector. Of all Financial Services Committee members, only Kanjorski and Bachus receive over 40% of their career campaign contributions from the FIRE sector.

Kanjorski has stated that he will be watchful of the influence the finance and insurance companies hold in the committee, “"We must ensure that special interests do not weaken particular solutions to the point of becoming toothless.” Earlier this year, however, Kanjorski held a fundraiser that was thrown by lobbyists for financial services organizations. Kanjorski refused to release a list of attendees to the fundraiser.

Recently, Kanjorski has introduced a series of bills to reform the regulatory structure for the SEC, hedge funds and insurance. Many trade groups and companies that have donated to Kanjorski and other committee members are organizing to oppose large sections of the bills.

The industry has already had successes this year. Committee consideration of a bill to create a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency was delayed after industry trade groups sent a letter to the committee demanding they delay consideration. The bill was later changed to be narrower in focus than the original language.

A Bloomberg report also notes that the derivatives lobby, headed by large banks JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, worked the New Democrats, including Rep. Melissa Bean, to get changes made to a bill aimed at filling holes in derivative regulation. Officials in the Obama administration stated that the resulting bill, released as a discussion draft, "created too many loopholes and had the potential to exclude all hedge funds and corporate end-users from oversight." Bean received 42% of her $634,535 in campaign contributions in 2009 from the FIRE sector.

While top committee committee members are seeing the FIRE sector make it rain on their campaign committees, a number of less senior members are pulling in more modest sums. Thirty-five committee members receive 20% or less of their 2009 contributions from the FIRE sector. Ten of these thirty-five members received 12% or less from the FIRE sector so far in 2009, half of the 24% committee average.

These bottom twelve include Rep. Maxine Waters, who has received no money from the sector, and Rep. Ron Paul who has pulled in only $1,000 or 3% of his 2009 campaign haul. The other members in the bottom ten are Reps. Steve Driehaus (8%), Keith Ellison (8%), Mary Jo Kilroy (8%), Frank Lucas (9%), Carolyn McCarthy (11%), Alan Grayson (12%), Adam Putnam (12%) and Al Green (12%).

All campaign contribution data is courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org) A CSV of the research is available. Feel free to use it, but please cite Sunlight and CRP/OpenSecrets.

One way that transparency can directly affect outcomes is when information is released in ways that preempt bad decisions. In the case of the federal bailouts, the possibility of transparency averting the impolitic decisions of bonuses and bogus assertions seems particularly acute. Transparency could also help consumers by providing information prior to and during a decision-making process, like purchasing a home. I thought this quote from Timothy Day, vice president of government affairs with data analytics firm Teradata, in this NextGov post summed it up pretty well:

"If a bank had shown more information [last year] as it relates to their mortgages, people making $100,000 salaries would not be getting $500,000 mortgages," he said. "The government is never really going to have true transparency and true accountability unless there is more data in a centralized database."

As part of the Read the Bill campaign, we’ve been writing a series of case studies highlighting bills that slipped through Congress with little time for public input or for lawmakers to review. After reading the following, please go to ReadTheBill.org and sign the petition to tell Congress that bills should be made publicly available for at least 72 hours prior to consideration. And now, your case study: the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

In the waning days of the 106th Congress and the Clinton administration, Congress met in a lame-duck session to complete work on a variety of appropriations bills that were not passed prior to the 2000 election. There were other, unmet pet priorities of some lawmakers that were under consideration as well. One of those pet priorities was a 262-page deregulatory bill, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Tucked into a bloated 11,000 page conference report as a rider, with little consideration and no time for review, this bill would be viewed only eight years later as part of the failure of our political system abetting a financial storm that brought the world to its knees.

The saga of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act begins in 1998. At the time, the economy was booming, stocks soared, and new instruments of trading were found to make more money while evading the oversight of regulatory bodies. Two of those growing instruments were financial derivatives and credit-default swaps. As these new financial instruments emerged a debate began over whether or not to regulate them.

The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) Brooksley Born issued a first call for her regulatory commission to have power to oversee financial derivatives. While previous legislative attempts had been made earlier, Born’s efforts were the most direct and threatening to the financial industry. During an April 1998 meeting of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (and later Secretary Larry Summers), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Arthur Levitt opposed Born’s efforts and attempted to derail her.

[A]n unregulated derivatives market ... could “pose grave dangers to our economy.”

Soon afterwards, Born released a “concept” paper with ideas of what regulation of derivatives and swaps could look like under the CFTC’s oversight authority. The response to Born’s paper was swift. The financial industry and government officials responded fiercely in opposition to Born’s ideas. Greenspan, Summers, and Senate committee chairmen all criticized her and her proposals.

In the midst of this debate Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a major hedge fund employing some of the top economists, collapsed. LTCM was highly over-leveraged and held a big portfolio of swaps. In the end, during the government organized bailout of the company, LTCM recorded a loss of $1.6 billion on swaps alone.

Born felt that an unregulated derivatives market that spawned the LTCM bailout could “pose grave dangers to our economy.” In the end, Born lost her battle and, in May 1999, asked to be replaced as CFTC chairman. The new chairman, William Rainer, was more amenable to the positions of industry leaders and the major government officials Summers, Greenspan, and Levitt. Later that year, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets released a report calling for “no regulations” of derivatives and swaps and began crafting a program to make that possible. Meanwhile in Congress, lawmakers were still up-in-arms over Born’s attempts to regulate the financial derivatives market and began working to pass their own set of deregulatory language.

Leading the charge in Congress were Sens. Phil Gramm (R-TX) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Rep. Thomas Ewing (R-IL). In May of 2000, Rep. Ewing introduced his Commodity Futures Modernization Act. While Ewing’s bill sailed quickly through the House, it stalled in the Senate, as Sen. Gramm desired stricter deregulatory language be inserted into the bill. Gramm opposed any language that could provide the SEC or the CFTC with any hope of authority in regulating or oversight of financial derivatives and swaps. Gramm’s opposition held the bill in limbo until Congress went into recess for the 2000 election.

Throughout the better part of the year Gramm, Lugar and Ewing worked with the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets—most specifically, Treasury Secretary Summers, CFTC Chairman Rainer and SEC Chairman Levitt—to strike a deal on the bill.

"Details of the final language are not immediately available."

Little attention followed Congress as the contentious 2000 presidential election was stuck in a stalemate as lawyers and khaki-clad protesters fought over the Florida recount to decide whether Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore would be the next president.

During a lame-duck December session, while the media was focused on the recounts and court cases, Gramm and Ewing sought to strike a compromise on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gov. Bush, December 14, Ewing introduced a new version of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. On December 15, with little warning or fanfare—aside from the overshadowed discussions on the floors of Congress—the new, compromise version was included as a rider to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2001, an 11,000 page omnibus appropriations conference report.

HedgeWorld Daily News, a trade publication for hedge funds and one of the few news outlets following the bill, stated, “Details of the final language are not immediately available. Congressional aides said Sen. Gramm did succeed in getting additional language protecting the legal certainty of swap, especially those traded by banks, which are the main users of the products.”

The final language, which the public was hardly aware of, contained some new sections not in the original Ewing bill that, for all intents and purposes, exempted swaps and derivatives from regulation by both the CFTC, which had already implemented rules that it would not regulate swaps and derivatives, and the SEC. Also, hidden within the bill was an exemption for energy derivative trading, which would later become known as the “Enron loophole” – this loophole would provide the impetus for Enron’s nose dive into full blown corporate corruption.

Ultimately, while the unregulated market in derivatives and swaps did not cause the economic downturn itself, it was a propellant of the crisis, accelerating the collapses of major financial companies across the globe. As of June 30, 2008, the global derivatives market had exploded to $530 trillion, while credit default swaps had grown from mere insignificance to $55 billion. When the credit crisis and the mortgage meltdown began to take hold, major firms found out the swaps made their investments far riskier than they could handle.

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and American International Group (AIG) all collapsed due to problems with the unregulated market of credit default swaps. The major banks were also heavily involved with credit default swaps. A report from the Comptroller of the Currency recorded in the third quarter of 2007 that the top banks in the credit default market were JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wachovia. Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia after it collapsed. Bank of America has received approximately $45 billion in TARP funds from the Treasury Department, mostly to offset losses from its acquisitions of Countrywide Financial in 2007 and Merrill Lynch in 2008. Citibank’s parent company Citigroup faced a complete meltdown during the end of 2008, received $50 billion in TARP funds from Treasury, and is breaking apart into smaller companies. JP Morgan Chase, while weathering the crisis far better than the other banks, still received $25 billion in TARP funds.

If ever there was a case where Congress should have given more time and listened closer, this was it.

Consensus is nearly universal that the failure to regulate financial derivatives trading and the subsequent explosion of credit default swaps, by passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, was a mistake. Deregulation supporter Chris Cox, a former SEC chairman under President George W. Bush and congressman from California, called the swaps “the fuel for what has become a global credit crisis.” According to Bloomberg, Alan Greenspan “acknowledges he’d been ‘partially’ wrong to oppose regulation of such instruments.” Former SEC chairman Levitt stated that if given the chance for a do-over he “would have pushed for some way to give greater transparency to products which turned out to be injurious to our markets.”

In the end, the country would have been better served had Congress not taken the 262-page Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had trouble passing Congress on its own accord, and inserted it into a bloated 11,000 page conference report when no one was looking. If ever there was a case where Congress should have given more time and listened closer, this was it. Now, we’re all paying for it.

Following calls from their fellow senators, Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd and Ranking Member Richard Shelby slammed the Federal Reserve for refusing to release the names of the counterparties to the A.I.G. bailout. The counterparties are the ones who are actually receiving the majority of the bailout money.

During a committee hearing this morning on A.I.G.'s problems, Dodd stated clearly that "it is not clear who we are rescuing." The counterparties were not "innocent victims" and the public "has a right to know" who is receiving the bailout funds sent through A.I.G.

When questioned, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn refused to release the names of the counterparties because it could "make companies less likely to do business with anyone receiving government funds, risking further turmoil at AIG and in financial markets more broadly."

Dodd and Shelby both laid into Kohn, telling him his statement was "not adequate" and "very disturbing." Shelby further stated, "People want to know what you’ve done with this money."

You can watch the full committee hearing here.

UPDATE: Should also point out this moment from Sen. Jim Bunning:

“You are telling us,” he said sternly to Mr. Kohn, “that the counterparties that got par for their bonds or for whatever — the American taxpayer shouldn’t know who they are? And then you may come back to us and ask for more money for more banks and more corporations? You will get the biggest ‘no’ you ever got.”

He added that he would do everything in his power to “stop you from wasting the taxpayers’ money on a lost cause.”

A.I.G. counterparty transparency is quickly becoming a bipartisan populist issue. Who will drop a bill to force the disclosure?

I think that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke spoke for all Americans when he testified yesterday that the one thing that has angered him the most during our current economic crisis is the ongoing bailout of A.I.G. So far, A.I.G. has received approximately $186 billion from the U.S. government in a bailout to protect the insurance giant's huge losses. But, as Josh Marshall noted over the weekend, the bailout of A.I.G. isn’t really a bailout of A.I.G., but a bailout of the counterparties that had insurance policies to back up their mortgage-backed securities (now known as toxic assets).

Despite the knowledge that the bailout of A.I.G. is, in fact, a bailout of counterparties, A.I.G. and the Federal Reserve refuse to disclose the identities of the counterparties. In a Senate Budget Committee hearing yesterday, Sen. Ron Wyden berated Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke about the failure to release the names of the counterparties, the actual bailout recipients. Bernanke stated that “under normal conditions” the counterparties would “have a presumption of privacy”. As the New York Times' Joe Nocera put it two days ago,

“Gobs of tax money is going to bail out unnamed companies — and yet we aren’t allowed to know who they are, and are supposed to take it all on faith. You know those awful cases you read about every once in a while where a child dies in a troubled home — and then the state health department won’t divulge any information out of “privacy concerns”? This strikes me as the financial equivalent of those cases. As excuses go, it sure is convenient.”

It truly does not make sense that the taxpayers need to be left in the dark about whom we are bailing out. Representative government requires that our representatives and us little people know what we are spending our money on, particularly if that money is meant to prop up the bad decisions of private enterprise.

In conjunction with this transparency problem comes word that A.I.G. is paying two Washington spin machines, Hill & Knowlton and Burston Marsteller, to do positive PR for the belly-up company.

A.I.G. probably needs a spin army after the way they operated outside of regulations and oversight, essentially running a scam insurance business that could collapse numerous foreign banks. I'm just curious as to how a company that is nearly wholly owned by the U.S. government can pay for expensive PR firms.