I can't help but puke when I see stuff like this article. "Protect the Consumer" is like "open borders" and other Big Rock Candy Mountain crap. I would add some other compassion favs but I've made the point well enough.
What matters in this re-regulation of the financial industry is the limiting of leverage. That is about as short and direct and compact and correct as it gets. All of the crap about handing the "customers" another 5 volumes of reading concerning interest rate escalation and the like is just about worthless as tits on a boar hog. If you want to protect consumers then fix the bankruptcy laws making it the responsibility of the lenders to make sure the loans can be repaid. Financial regulation is another matter altogether.
While it is certainly possible for the less alert to be ripped off by the silver lipped, the creation of laws and regulations to protect morons has to stop somewhere. What matters is the control of credit to insure that hucksters cannot rip off THE SYSTEM the way they did in the recent financial bubble. It was the ability of hucksters to create credit well beyond the ability of the system, that caused the recent meltdown. And at the heart of fixing what is broken is the part of the bill that insists on CDS contracts being treated as futures contracts on a regulated exchange, limits on the size of financial institutions, and the separation of depository institutions from the larger 100% reserved institutions like credit card companies and investment banks and brokerages.
What is happening in the Senate is a marvelous "look over here" job that is used to start a big ideological battle, a diversion, that lets the needed legislation fall by the wayside untended. The left wing lollipop suckers will make a major "stand" on this consumer protection sideshow and claim a major victory while needed reform goes wanting. And the Senators and the Financiers will give you whatever you want in this area and go have a beer and laugh at all of you. They want to be able to create money (derivatives) in the "shadow monetary system" as opposed to having regulated exchanges. It is this shadow monetary scheme that they just got away with. They created more credit than could ever be managed and then government paid them and is still paying them. That is the problem that must be resolved in a way that stops such thieving in the future. Most people do not even understand the risks here. At present the US government still controls the US dollar. The banksters have gone a long way in wresting the control of the money supply from the elected government and placing it into their own unelected hands. It isn't as if money were gold coins. Money is a loan and a contract. And government must regulate it or government has no power at all.