I see that the slow boat to financial reform continues to drift sideways, as Senate Banking Committee member Bob Corker followed Paul Volcker's call for action yesterday with a sorry-no-can-do.

Unlike health-care reform, Democrats will need the support of a Republican like Corker to get a bill containing resolution authority for big banks, derivatives regulation, and consumer protection enacted this year. Only one piece of legislation can be passed through the budget reconciliation process in any one year, and now that the process was used for health-care reform, everything else will require a filibuster-proof majority that the Democrats no longer have.

Does the banking industry need to be able to screw its consumers in order to be profitable? If so, it's in even worse shape than I thought.

Yet that's what Senator Richard Shelby suggested when he wowed the audience in a speech at an American Bankers Association conference last week. Saying the Republicans in Congress would do everything they could do prevent efforts to rein in banks, Shelby noted that "safety and soundness trumps everything," including "the consumer finance whatever."

You have to hand it to Senator Chris Dodd. For someone who has heavily depended on the generosity of the largest banks and investment firms for his fund-raising, he has proposed a pretty impressive bill for further regulating the financial firms....given the current environment in Washington, of course.

I am not confident it will prevent another AIG, Lehman or Bear Stearns. The current poisoned partisanship in Washington on both sides of the aisle wouldn't support that kind of onerous bill.

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has never been a popular guy. He long had a reputation for being a bully, tough to work for. He would threaten lawsuits when he senses a publication was working on a story critical of him or his company. And in his 32 years running American International Group (AIG), he was routinely criticized for not have a viable successor in place in case he abruptly could no longer run the insurance giant.

In 2005, however, the 84 year-old resigned on the urging of then-New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who was investigating the questionable practices of a number of insurance companies, including AIG.

A conference on financial reform held today by the Roosevelt Institute really tells it like it is when it comes to what's going on in the nation's capital. And "it" isn't pretty. 

I just heard Congressional TARP cop Elizabeth Warren, for example, accuse banks of "bullying" Washington into doing its bidding over consumer protection.

For better or for worse, the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency - already being shrunk in Washington shorthand to CFPA - would create another level of government bureaucracy.

Its advocates have a two-word response: "So what?"