Bloomberg has this from Obama on the financial sector:

White House officials say they are growing frustrated that the banking industry is fighting President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul financial regulations after taxpayer bailouts helped firms restore profits and near- record compensation for executives.

Their anger is directed even at firms such as New York’s JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that have paid back their government assistance and reported a surge in third- quarter earnings this week. The issue, according to administration officials, is the industry is generally on sound footing because of government help and lobbying against Obama’s regulatory plans goes against the nation’s long-term interest.

/snip/

Now is the time for “firm rules of the road so that banks can’t game the system and the financial crisis on Wall Street doesn’t end up hurting folks on Main Street,” Obama said last night at a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco.

With the 2002 Intern of the Year in charge of looking for firms gaming the system, we have all the evidence we need of how serious Obama is about enforcement.

And, just how does Obama think the Wall Street crisis hasn't yet hurt folks on Main Street? That is probably the most upsetting part of his statement. Main Street is reeling and there are two direct causes: Wall Street theft and outrageous war expenses. Does Obama really think Main Street doesn't understand that? Even the teabaggers understand the Wall Street story.

Note what Storch's duty will be, from the Times article that is Glenn's first link:

Storch also will supervise the SEC's Office of Market Intelligence, with an eye to improving the monitoring, collection and analysis of the hundreds of thousands of tips and complaints the agency receives annually

That seems natural enough, given his post at Goldman was a vice president in their Business Intelligence Group.

However, there is much more than meets the eye here. There has been much talk lately, and even the beginnings of legislative action to address the fact that it is not illegal to trade securities or securities futures based on knowledge obtained through government activities. Now think about Goldman's high level of access to government officials and then think about this quarter's profits being driven primarily by trading activity rather than ordinary investment banking activities.

Here is a bit from the Wall Street Journal about the efforts to bring insider trading on government information under some sort of regulatory scrutiny (linked at my name):

Expanding insider-trading rules in the futures markets, however, is a relatively new position for the CFTC. The report proposes to make it illegal to trade futures on the basis of non-public information obtained from government agencies like the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Department of Agriculture.

"Non-public information at the CFTC is currently expressly addressed by the statute," CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said Friday. "We want to make sure that no misappropriation or misuse of non-public information from other governmental agencies can be done."

Schapiro added that she expects "broader discussion about insider-trading beyond just the appropriation or misappropriation from a government source" now that Congress is preparing to empower the SEC and CFTC to regulate over-the-counter derivatives. Bills pending in the U.S. House would divide jurisdiction over security-based swaps between the SEC and CFTC, raising concerns at the SEC that some swap traders may be able to evade insider-trading rules.

To improve cooperation, the SEC and CFTC called for a joint enforcement task force to "harness synergies from shared market surveillance data, improve market oversight, enhance enforcement and relieve duplicative regulatory burdens."

Yes, it looks like Storch is being chosen as the one to set up this market surveillance meant to detect, among other things, trading on data obtained from the government. I'd feel much better about this if I didn't suspect that Goldman Sachs will somehow be exempt from scrutiny for such actions while all others will be punished.

I put up a diary at The Seminal earlier today where I went into more detail on the NYTimes article about the public relations nightmare surrounding the huge bonuses. Here's the last bit:

How does it come as any great surprise, then, that for Goldman Sachs employees, the Times states “it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened”? Actually, for them, it didn’t. They had the inside track in Washington and they were protected above all others. They still have the inside track in Washington and, sadly, they will continue with the motto the Times notes:

“Greedy, but long-term greedy.”

Oh, their plan for defusing the outrage? Here’s the Times:

Goldman said Thursday that it would donate $200 million to its charitable foundation (that figure represents 6 percent of its third-quarter profit, or about six days of earnings).

And on the seventh, and all the other days of the quarter, Goldman Sachs executives partied.

I suspect that Geithner was invited to many of those parties...

A little artistic license...

[Not that there's been any exaggeration in today's thread, or anything.]

For crying out loud; are they aware of arithmetic?

Well, it is another dirty A-rab invention.

It appears that you managed to put the word blockquote between carats <>. That turns the blockquote function on. To turn it off, use a second set of carats with the word blockquote, but put a / in front of the word but inside the carat. [All the other features, like italics and bold work the same way, italics is i and bold is b.

For bonus points, you should be aware that a bug in the blockquote feature kills the first hard carriage return ("enter" key), so you need to adjust for that. Preview is your friend: it allows you to look at how your message will be displayed while there is still time to fix errors. You can hit preview again after editing to make sure you got it right.