Federal regulators are considering backing off a plan to curb Wall Street’s control over the derivatives market, another potential win for the big banks.

Last fall, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposed rules that would prevent a bank or financial firm from controlling more than 20 percent of any one derivatives exchange or trading facility. Now, regulators are discussing lowering the cap, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

STOP THIS. YOU’RE GOING TO DESTROY THE PLANET.

Seriously, deregulated derivative markets have helped to cause one of the largest economic recessions in U.S. history. Sure, Wall Street had a few bumps on the road but they got right back on their feet (with some help from the U.S. taxypayer). That isn’t the case for the average middle and lower class American.

These people were given the keys to the bank, they robbed it, and you’re giving them a second chance.

Do we have a Democratic Republic anymore or a permanent Robber Baron enrichment scheme? Sweet Jesus.

The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent.

Total C.E.O. pay hasn’t quite returned to its heady, prerecession levels — but it certainly seems headed there. Despite the soft economy, weak home prices and persistently high unemployment, some top executives are already making more than they were before the economy soured.

They can afford a tax increase. They can live with one less Cessna, one less expensive painting, one less diamond earring, one less big-screen LCD tv, one less Ferrari. They can afford it.

Our democracy can’t afford giving them even more breaks. Not anymore.

If Congress fails to raise the national debt limit by early August, the Obama Treasury Department will have to choose between defaulting on obligations to the country’s creditors — triggering higher interest rates and perhaps damaging the country’s credit rating for months and years to come — or freezing outlays to contractors, entitlement beneficiaries and others who are also expecting prompt payment as well. In either case, the macroeconomic impact will be staggering, according to Zandi.

“I think we go into recession and my forecast would be blown out of the water,” he said. “I think if we get to August 2nd and there is no debt ceiling [increase] and there has to be significant spending cuts, I think even if Congress and the administration reverse themselves days later, I think the damage will have been serious and we’ll probably be thrown into a recession.”

I would advise President Obama to appeal to their sense of patriotism, but who are we trying to kid here?

Ultimately, we find little evidence that the ACA will negatively affect small firms, and, instead, we find evidence of significant benefits for these employers and their workers. The law expands coverage options for small firms while limiting the new requirements imposed on this group. The smallest firms will see a significant increase in offer rates under the ACA, and firms of all sizes will see substantial savings on premium contributions. While the effects of the ACA on employer sponsored coverage for small-firm workers and their dependents are estimated to be small, these workers and their families are expected to reap significant benefits from the law as a whole. When accounting for the effects of the Medicaid expansion, individual health insurance exchanges and federal subsidies for low- and moderate-income families, small-firm workers and their families are expected to experience large increases in insurance coverage under reform.

“What I find annoying is the politicians taking John-Maynard Keynes’ name in vain,” Pedro de Noronha, the managing partner at Noster Capital told CNBC in an interview on Thursday.

“I am tired of politicians like President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner quoting Keynes to justify their spending plans when politicians consistently refuse to listen to Keynes’ complete message,” he said.

The point has been made before many times. Don’t cut spending in a recession; austerity into a downturn makes things much worse.

In the UK a number of economists are calling on Chancellor George Osborne to consider a plan B to austerity, but for de Noronha this view is self-serving for the politicians who refuse to spend less.

“What Keynes said on not cutting spending in a recession has been widely quoted, correctly,” he said.

“What those quoting him forget though is that Keynes said governments should run a budget surplus in the good times,” said de Noronha.

A lot of conservatives have tried mighty hard to say that the too-slow recovery means Keynesian economics doesn’t work. The problem is we haven’t tried it, yet.

In a highly anticipated vote, the Senate rejected by 54 to 45 an amendment from Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., on Wednesday that would have delayed a swipe fee regulation from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

The move decides the fate of a $14 billion a year industry and ends another chapter in the intense lobbying war between retailers and bankers in which millions of dollars have been spent on print, television and radio ads within the Capital Beltway and beyond targeting key member states.

Durbin caught the banking industry by surprise last year when he convinced 64 senators to support adding his measure to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It requires the Federal Reserve Board by July 21 to ensure fees banks charge merchants for debit card purchases are “reasonable and proportional.”

The Fed has proposed slashing the charge per transaction to 12 cents from an average of 44 cents but has not issued a final rule.

Tester is such a disappointment. He’s marginally better than Conrad Burns, the Republican he replaced, but he’s turned out definitely not to be the populist-leaning senator he originally ran as.

Bob Corker was his co-sponsor, but I can’t blame Corker for doing the dirty work of big banks… that’s what Republicans go to Washington to do.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree with CAP (Center for American Progress) on the way they determine Exxon’s taxes — but it would have been nice if the newspaper even tried to get to the truth. Instead they took the lazy way out and presented two arbitrary sides to an issue.

The mainstream media is often very, very afraid to render a verdict because someone will be upset with them, so they prefer to serve up bowls of mush instead. This does not serve the readers well.

Republican Federal Communications Commission commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is planning to leave the agency for a job at Comcast Corp., according to people with knowledge of the matter.

…

Baker’s move to Comcast comes just four months after she voted, along with three of the agency’s other FCC commissioners, to approve Comcast’s $13.75 billion deal to acquire control of NBC Universal from General Electric Co.

This happens to be a Republican, but the revolving door opens for Democrats too. It’s corruption all around. As a friend notes, this is so wrong, if you scripted it in a movie it would be consider unrealistic.

Some Democrats have made noise about ending taxpayer subsidies of this megacorporation, and like clockwork conservatives are once again shilling for coporate welfare.

First there’s Bruce McQuain of Questions & Observations (after being invited on a conference call with the bosses at ExxonMobil), whining that stopping government support of this business is an “attack” on “job creators”.

Then on Fox, Ben Ferguson moans that ExxonMobil is being unfairly targeted.

Of course, I doubt with a GOP House that these breaks will be rescinded (and it wasn’t even very likely when the House was in Democratic control), but its pretty illustrative of just how big a lie the supposed grassroots populism of the Tea Party element is. Modern conservatism is and always has been about big business getting their piece of corporate welfare.

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drug makers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson’s that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

(via)

American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.

Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.

“Socialism” is apparently good for business.

I mean this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one: Given this history, why should we believe that the Bush tax cuts were pro-growth?

Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000.

Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade.

(via Seth M.)

Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

One in four dollars raised by Daniel M. Donovan Jr., the Republican candidate for New York attorney general, can be traced to a $17 billion hedge fund whose chief executive has emerged as a staunch and influential defender of Wall Street this election year, campaign records show.

The scale of the donations from those tied to the fund, Elliott Management, is striking because outside of the federal government, perhaps no single office has as much power to police the financial industry as New York’s attorney general.

Over the course of his campaign, however, Mr. Donovan has repeatedly promoted his cautious, nonconfrontational approach to Wall Street, saying that he has no intention of serving as the financial industry’s ‘sheriff,’ a nickname earned by former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whose aggressive investigations resulted in billion-dollar settlements and sweeping changes.

Warren watch continues…

A White House official confirms that President Obama met with Elizabeth Warren at the White House on Tuesday, a top contender for heading the Consumer Financial Protection Board.

‘Elizabeth Warren is a respected advocate and she was meeting at the White House Tuesday, but no decision has been made about the consumer agency,’ White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage says of the possibility of Warren being named the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Board.

The invisible hand of fail.

The largest egg recall in U.S. history comes at a point of great consolidation in the egg industry, when a shrinking number of companies produce most of the eggs found on grocery shelves and a defect in one operation can jeopardize a significant segment of the marketplace.

“I don’t think people have any idea when they see all these brand names in the stores that so many are coming from the same place,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a food safety organization. “It raises the stakes — if one company is doing something wrong, it affects a lot of food.”

The legislation gives the government new powers to break up companies that threaten the economy, creates a new agency to guard consumers in their financial transactions and shines a light into shadow financial markets that have escaped the oversight of regulators.

Named after Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the legislation ends a trend to ease regulations and clamps down on the financial industry in ways unseen since the Great Depression.

The Federal Trade Commission will open an investigation to determine if Apple Inc.’s mobile software business practices are squashing competitors, according to a report published Friday.

The Wall Street Journal said the FTC will start an investigation, citing people familiar with the situation. The newspaper said that the FTC has been working with the Justice Department for weeks to decide which agency will review allegations from companies complaining of being barred from the mobile platform that runs its iPhone and iPad devices.

Now, a source tells us that American Apparel has a new hiring policy. For the past several months, they say, job applicants at AA have had their photos taken—photos which are then sent to the email address work@americanapparel.net, where they are “approved” by a nameless person for hiring. The applicant’s resumé is a distant second when it comes to hiring decisions, our source says.

Our source also tells us that a new policy now says that in order for current AA employees to be approved for a promotion or raise, they must also have their photos approved. As they put it, “Your looks determine your position and pay rate, not how effective you are at your job.”