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What The Financial Bill Did And Didn't Do

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Today, President Obama signed into law the Wall Street Reform and Consumer
Protection Act, which overhauls the financial regulatory system. At the signing
ceremony, the president said: For years, our financial sector was governed by
antiquated and poorly enforced rules that allowed some to take risks and
destroy the economy. The president describes the new law as the strongest
consumer financial protections in history.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama called the 2,300-page bill a
legislative monster that will place new regulatory burdens on businesses.

My guest, Binyamin Appelbaum, is a financial reporter for The New York Times.
He says these reforms will subject more financial companies to federal
oversight, regulate many derivatives contracts and create a panel to detect
risk to the financial system. It will also create a consumer protection
regulator.

Appelbaum won a George Polk Award for his reporting on home foreclosures in
North Carolina back in 2007, just as the housing bubble began to burst.

Binyamin Appelbaum, welcome to FRESH AIR. In a recent article, you and fellow
reporter David Hershenhorn describe the bill as, quote, “a catalogue of repairs
and additions to the rusted infrastructure of a regulatory system that has
failed to keep up with the expanding scope and complexity of modern finance.”

That catalogue of repairs and additions to the rusted infrastructure part makes
it sound like you think the system is still kind of corroding. Is that what you
mean?

Mr. BINYAMIN APPELBAUM (Financial Reporter, New York Times): We still have the
same system, and that system is badly corroded and was, by all accounts, badly
in need of repairs. There were people who thought that what we should do with
it is tear it down and build an entirely new system of regulations in its
place.

What the government decided to do instead was seek to repair it. And so this
bill an attempt to update it and to make it modern and to build a regulatory
system that can keep pace with the modern financial industry. We'll see how
well that works.

GROSS: Now you pointed out that President Obama chose to supersize regulations
instead of downsizing the financial industry. Would you describe the different
in those two approaches?

Mr. APPELBAUM: This is a more-lifeguards approach to financial reform. There
were two ways the government could have proceeded in the aftermath of the
financial crisis.

One was to constrain the banking industry, to tell them that they could no
longer engage in certain types of activities, that high-risk types of trading
were off limits, that certain types of products could no longer be sold or
purchased, that banks needed to get smaller. That's what we decided not to do.
The bill leaves the financial industry substantially intact. It allows them to
do almost everything that they were doing in the run-up to the crisis.

The difference that this bill makes is that we're hiring more lifeguards, in
essence. We're putting more federal regulators around the pool. We're giving
them more money, more power, more resources and hoping that they will produce
better results.

GROSS: Now, there were a lot of regulators already before the crisis. For
instance, there were regulators at the Federal Reserve, who chose not to
regulate some of the things that were going wrong in the financial industry. So
is there confidence within the financial world or within the consumer world or
within the Obama administration that more regulators or more money will prevent
another financial meltdown?

Mr. APPELBAUM: There certainly is confidence at the highest levels of the Obama
administration that this is the approach that makes sense. It's the approach
that the administration detailed a year ago, and Congress has substantially
honored the administration's wishes in writing this legislation.

So what we have is a very fair reflection of what the president and his top
advisors believe is the best course of action, which is to place a bet on the
same regulatory agencies, with some significant changes but still in essence
the same regulators, to do a better job the next time around. There are a valid
reasons that a lot of people have concerns about that, but that is their plan.

GROSS: Since the Obama administration chose to take the approach of supersizing
regulations, what was the alternative?

Mr. APPELBAUM: There were two real alternatives. One, which was favored by a
lot of economists, liberal economists and a lot of consumer advocates and a
fair number of liberal senators, as well, was to constrain the financial
industry. We've had a remarkable growth in the size of our largest banks in
recent decades. We've gone from a very atomized financial industry, where
institutions were primarily local and served local markets, to a system where a
few giant banks dominate the landscape.

Companies like Bank of America and Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are so large -
you know, those three companies and Wells Fargo together control more than half
of many of the consumer financial marketplaces – that they dominate the
industry in a way that we haven't seen before. And when they get into trouble,
there appears to be no alternative, in terms of the health of the broader
economy, than to rescue them from failure, which is what happened two years
ago.

So there were people who thought we should make those companies smaller, chop
them up into pieces, limit their ability to dominate the marketplace in the way
that they do and bring them back down to a size where if they failed, we could
tolerate it, the economy could tolerate it.

There were also proposals to constrain what happens on Wall Street, some of the
riskiest types of trading, to, you know, require companies to separate out
high-risk forms of trading or to stop engaging in them all together.

GROSS: So in terms of the too big to fail, is the current legislation designed
to prevent institutions from getting too big to fail, which would mean if they
did fail, we'd have to bail them out because we couldn't afford to have them
fail?

Mr. APPELBAUM: No, it's not. It explicitly takes the second approach, of saying
you can become big but we're going to create a new mechanism so that we can
allow you to fail. What this bill creates is a system, a sort of a parallel
process to the bankruptcy courts, where a financial company could be taken and
dismembered and liquidated in a way that the designers hope would not cause
broad economic damage.

GROSS: What does that mean? Say a really large financial institution like one
of the ones you just mentioned was in such trouble that it was going under. How
would the regulatory agency dismantle it?

Mr. APPELBAUM: So it's perhaps helpful to think about the example of Lehman
Brothers, which became the largest bankruptcy in American history in the fall
of 2008. The government was confronted with a choice. It could either find
someone to buy the company or it could essentially force it to shut down, but
there was no orderly way to take Lehman out of existence.

This new process would allow federal regulators to take control of that
company, to essentially close out its business, to distribute, to complete
contracts with buyers and borrowers and investors to pay them off on some, you
know, reasonable basis and to shut down the company. And if there are portions
of it that could be sold to other companies, to do so and thereby recoup some
of the losses from the shutdown but sort of take Lehman out of the financial
markets, which are sort of like a spider web of intertwined companies, you
know, with relationships, one with the other, that are difficult to sever.

It sort of is a way of pulling one company out of that interlinked network of
spider webs.

NORRIS: Is this at all like what the FDIC does when a small bank goes out, you
know, goes under?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Yeah, that's actually exactly the model for this. We have a
system, we've had it since the Great Depression, that allows the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. to take control of a failed bank, to hold on to the
most problematic parts of the bank, basically loans that are not going to be
repaid, and then to sell the rest of the bank, its branches, its computers, its
depositors, to another institution, which can then run the bank without its
problems.

This is a very similar idea and, in fact, it would be administered by the FDIC.

GROSS: So is it unprecedented to do this kind of takeover of a financial
institution that isn't FDIC insured, that isn't just a savings bank?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Yeah, it is unprecedented. It's never been legal before. It's
never been possible before. That's one of the innovations that this law would
create.

GROSS: Do you think that in some ways we, as a country, are a hostage to the
financial industry because the financial industry is such a big part of the
economy? And I think, you know, that lawmakers are really worried about hurting
the financial industry in a way that might hurt the American economy. At the
same time, many lawmakers want to rein in the financial industry and prevent
another crisis from happening.

But there is so much concern about hurting the banks in a way that might hurt
the economy. So are we hostage in some way?

Mr. APPELBAUM: I think that what we found as we walked into this crisis was
that our economy was so intertwined with our financial sector, so dependent on
our financial sector, that even as public anger built and some government
officials started looking at ways of punishing the industry or taking a pound
of flesh from the banks, what they found is that in their judgment, there was
no way to do that without damaging the broader economy.

And government officials have talked about this and said, for example, there
are proposals to propose a bank tax on banks, and the fear was that if you did
that to banks, if you required them to make that kind of payment, it would
limit their ability to make new loans at a moment when the economy desperately
needs new loans.

If you, you know, imposed restrictions on their activities, you would be
constraining economic growth. And so, yeah, we've grown to a point where the
financial industry is so much at the heart of the modern American economy that
punishing it or even restraining it is very difficult to do.

It's essentially a form of choking yourself. And you need to have the
confidence that that's the right thing to do, that there's a long-term benefit
to doing it. And thus far, the judgment in Washington has been that it isn't,
that the financial industry is – they brought us to the dance and we're going
to leave with them.

GROSS: So what does it mean that the financial industry is so much at the heart
of the economy? Like, can you give us an example of what that means?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Sure, you know, it is the case that our economy over the last
several decades has been in a process of transformation that'll be, you know,
familiar to many listeners, from being driven by manufacturing activity to
being driven by financing activity.

Our government has made a number of decisions that privilege financial activity
through lower tax rates, through the ease of borrowing, through encouraging
investors to put their money into the American marketplace. And the effect of
that has been, in some cases, as direct as transforming the business model of
given companies from manufacturing widgets in Idaho to manufacturing those
widgets in China, and the company that is still in Idaho now is in the business
of financing the sale of those widgets to American customers.

So you've had a transformation where we've stopped making things and started
financing the making of those same things in other countries. And what you've
seen is a growth in the financial sector to the point where at the high point
before the crisis, I believe 43 percent of corporate profits in America were in
the financial industry.

And that's kind of an astonishing number if you recall that financing is
supposed to be an intermediation. It's supposed to be sort of the role of
middlemen in the economy. Facilitating the movement of money from one place to
the other has now become 43 percent of our economic activity.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, we're talking about the new financial reform
legislation. My guest is Binyamin Appelbaum, who is a financial correspondent
for The New York Times. He's based in Washington, D.C. Let's take a short break
here and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: We're talking about the new financial reform legislation. My guest,
Binyamin Appelbaum, covers finance for The New York Times. He's based in
Washington, D.C. So this new legislation is over 2,000 pages, right?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Twenty-three-hundred pages.

GROSS: And has anybody read all 2,300 pages?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. APPELBAUM: I hope that someone has, but I'm not – and perhaps I've even met
them and not known it, but not a lot of people have read all those pages.

GROSS: So in those...

Mr. APPELBAUM: There are actually committees set up at - many of the major
trade groups in Washington have set up committees of lawyers to read the
entirety of the bill so that, you know, one person is not forced to do that.
And they divide it up amongst themselves and they sit around in their offices
reading it and parsing it. So even the people who are paid the most to
understand what is in this have generally taken the approach of not doing it
all themselves.

GROSS: Well, let's look at some of the highlights of these over-2,000 pages.
What are the new regulatory institutions that this new legislation sets up?

Mr. APPELBAUM: There are two big new institutions here. The headliner is called
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It will be an office of the Federal
Reserve that is devoted to protecting consumers and borrowers from abuse by
lenders.

And it sort of consolidates the authority to protect consumers that now rests
in about seven different federal agencies that are primarily devoted to
regulating financial companies. It takes it from those places, puts it in one
single bureau that will have the power to write rules about things like what
information you need to be provided when you apply for a mortgage loan or how
much your credit card company can charge you when you miss a payment or what
happens when you try to withdraw more money than you have from your bank
account. All of those issues will now be regulated by this new consumer
protection bureau.

GROSS: And the second agency, yeah?

Mr. APPELBAUM: The second one is a new oversight body, a coordinating council
of regulators that is responsible for policing problems in the financial system
that could pose risks to the broader economy.

The idea is that we've had sort of a silo structure of regulation where each
regulator was looking at their particular segment of the financial industry and
not paying attention to the broader consequences that something like subprime
lending could do, where, you know, if loans started failing, maybe a regulator
appreciated that some banks could be in trouble, but they didn't know that
investment banks had been providing funding to those banks, and they could also
be in trouble and that an insurance company called the American International
Group was providing insurance contracts on those loans, and it could be in
trouble.

No one was sort of looking at the big picture. And the idea is that this new
council would be able to do that.

GROSS: And what are some of the changes that are being made to banks and how
they operate? What are some of the changes that are already written into the
legislation?

Mr. APPELBAUM: There really are very few changes being made to banks and the
way that they operate particularly explicit in the legislation. Probably the
most prominent one is something called the Volcker Rule, which says that banks
cannot make their own investments alongside their customers' investments.

Many banks have made a great deal of money in recent years by running what are
called proprietary trading desks, groups of very talented traders whose job it
is basically to make money for the bank, to take, you know, the bank's capital,
invest it in the markets and make a quick return on it. That type of activity
is ruled out under the legislation.

GROSS: Because?

Mr. APPELBAUM: The idea is that a bank gets money more cheaply, a bank can
borrow money more cheaply than any other kind of company because the government
protects the banking industry. And that gives it a tremendous advantage. And
the reason the government protects banks is so that they will make loans to
small businesses, large businesses, consumers. Banks are playing a public
policy function.

And the concern was that if they're using that money instead to gamble,
essentially, to pursue their own investments, to make as much money as
possible, then the public policy rationale for protecting the banks doesn't
really pertain, and they may get themselves into trouble and need to be rescued
at taxpayer expense.

So Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, made a compelling
case that what made sense was to say to banks, hey, I'm sorry, if you want to
play under the government's safety net, you're not going to be able to pursue
that type of trading.

GROSS: I'm sure the banks weren't happy with that. What did they do to try to
resist the Volcker Rule?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Well, they actually resisted it quite successfully. The original
form of it was much more strict. It much more strictly defined proprietary
trading. So the original version of the Volcker Rule did that in a way that a
lot of experts felt was pretty, you know, was pretty tight and effective. But
in its modification by the Congress, it got a lot weaker.

And in one particular area, it got very weak, which is initially the rule said
banks can no longer make investments in hedge funds and in private equity
funds, investment vehicles. And by the time Congress was done with it, it said
banks can invest a fair amount of money in those vehicles, not more than a
certain threshold, but they set that threshold high enough so that it doesn't
really affect the prevailing practices in the industry.

So by the time we were done, we had a rule that basically said you can't do
what you're not doing anyways.

GROSS: You can't do what you're not already - you can't do what you're not
doing anyway?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Right.

GROSS: So you're saying this is going to be a very ineffective rule.

Mr. APPELBAUM: It doesn't really affect industry practice.

GROSS: What else is changing for the banks?

Mr. APPELBAUM: If you asked Lawrence Summers, the president's chief economic
advisor, and Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary, what they consider to be
the most important element of financial reform, they would tell you that it's
something called capital standards, which are the requirements that dictate how
much money banks need essentially to hold in reserve against unexpected losses,
basically how much body fat banks need to have. Because it wants to require
them to hold significantly more capital and by doing so, it will constrain
their ability to pursue some of the more excessive forms of financial activity
by weighing them down, essentially, by preventing them from borrowing quite as
much, by saying for every dollar that you have, you can only invest 85 or 90
cents of it, rather than 93 or 97 cents of it. It effectively constrains
financial activity.

The administration favors this approach because rather than needing to identify
particular areas as being the most risky, it can basically say we just want you
to wear more padding and whatever you do that gets yourself into trouble, the
padding will absorb it.

And those rules are not dictated by the legislation. Instead, they're being
negotiated in an international process, through something called the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision. And that is what the administration regards
as really the centerpiece of its effort to constrain banks, but it's not in the
legislation. It depends on this secondary process.

GROSS: Why is this a global process that's being negotiated in Basel, as
opposed to a U.S. process?

Mr. APPELBAUM: The key concern is that if the United States imposed rules
unilaterally, it would put American banks at a competitive disadvantage to
foreign institutions, which would be able, essentially, to operate more cheaply
than American banks because they would be required to wear less padding. And
that in so doing, you'd simply move financial activity overseas, and rather
than making it safer, you'd actually just push it away from us, push it away
from our shores. And banks would continue to do the same kinds of things,
they'd just do it in Hong Kong or Switzerland or England instead of in New
York.

So the administration really wants this to be an international agreement, and
it's a competitive issue, basically.

GROSS: My guest, Benyamin Appelbaum, will be back in the second half of the
show to talk more about the new Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
He's a financial reporter for The New York Times. I'm Terry Gross, and this is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. We're talking about the new Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed into
law today. It overhauls the financial regulatory system and creates a new
consumer financial protection bureau. My guest, Binyamin Appelbaum, is a
financial reporter for The New York Times.

Would you say that the banks lobbied pretty effectively for what they wanted in
this financial reform bill?

Mr. APPELBAUM: I think in some respects they were extremely effective. The
administration put out a proposal about a year ago that really detailed what it
wanted to see in a financial reform bill. And the final version hues pretty
closely to what the administration initially proposed. So the administration
officials have been crowing in recent days and saying basically, look, the
industry didn’t get its way, we got what we wanted instead.

What that story misses is that in the intervening year, liberals in the House
and Senate pushed very hard for a wide variety of more substantive restrictions
on the industry and more substantial reforms to the regulatory structure. Many
of those things were incorporated into the legislation at various points but
they were almost all stripped out of the final version. And that was where the
industry really succeeded.

It succeeded basically in holding the line and saying, all right, we're going
to lose a lot of this. We're going to have to give a lot of ground here but
let's not make it any worse than the administration's proposal. And they were
very effective in doing that.

GROSS: What did they do that was so effective?

Mr. APPELBAUM: I think that what a lot of people don’t understand about the
lobbying business in Washington is that the real secret to the industry's power
is information. They control information. They have so many more people,
researchers available to them that they can sort of - they educate Congress
about these issues. They go in there and make themselves available as
resources. The banking industry is sort of - they're like the reference library
for Congress.

Congress wants to understand this incredibly complicated issue that's
fundamentally unfamiliar to most of our elected representatives. They don’t
have experience with it, they don’t have knowledge of it, they're sort of
tinkering in a very complicated engine room and they're afraid that they're
going to break it. And the industry goes in there and offers them the
reassurance of an education and says to them, this is how it works: if you
touch this you'll cause, you know, all hell to break lose and if you touch that
it will be okay. It's all right to play with this lever but not that one.

This is tremendously powerful because it sets the terms of debate. It forces
Congress to rely on the industry's representations. And what the industry did
with tremendous success during this debate was to define for Congress what was
an acceptable area for meddling and what was not and how much meddling was too
much. They really won the information battle on some of these key issues.

GROSS: Now this legislation provides the first regulation of the so-called
black market, which I've also heard referred to as the shadow market. What is
this market that we're talking about?

Mr. APPELBAUM: The black and shadow market are industry terms for types of
financial activity that are not publicly reported or recorded. And one of the
largest black markets is the trade and derivatives, and this has become a vast
business. Derivatives grew up as a way of - for farmers to protect themselves
against changes in the price of corn more than a century ago and kept puttering
along on a fairly small scale for most of the intervening time. But in recent
decades, that industry has exploded as banks found new and astonishingly clever
ways to craft derivatives contracts.

Essentially like a casino offering new table games, the variety was sort of
like, you know, what are the new slot machines in this week. You can now bet on
- you know, the movement of one recent idea is to allow people to bet on the
movement of box office returns from movies. Just a proliferation of derivatives
contract, all of it happening in this black market where, you know, a bank
would sell a contract to a customer who might trade it to a third party and
then to a fourth. And regulators not only wouldn’t know that the fourth party
now held the contract, they didn’t know that the contract existed. They didn’t
know who was at risk if the bet was lost. They didn’t know, you know, what the
consequences would be for the broader financial system.

The bill in its original - the original idea was that regulators would require
substantially all derivatives to be traded through exchanges which, as you say,
is like a stock exchange. It means that the price of the instrument is publicly
disclosed, the amount that it's bought for.

That's very important because when banks are able to sell contracts privately,
customers have no ability to price compare or to shop. And many economists
believe that banks have been able to realize enormously fat profit margins on
these contracts by, you know, keeping - essentially keeping it secret. So
that's one requirement.

The second is a requirement that the instruments be traded through clearing
houses. This is basically a form of insurance. A clearing house is an entity
that sits in the middle of a trade and essentially guarantees that if the bet
is lost and one party welches on it, the clearing house steps in and makes good
on the wager.

So the idea was that you would have much more information about price and the
scope of the market and you would have some amount of insurance that bets would
be paid off.

GROSS: So the emphasis in this legislation is on regulation. But you say it
leaves a vast number of details to be worked out. What’s left to be worked out?

Mr. APPELBAUM: One lawyer said to me that he thought that this bill puts in
place about 25 percent of the details that will need to be put in place to
realize this new regulatory structure. This bill, it's kind of like a script
that's being handed to actors, which are the regulatory agencies, and they now
need to decide how it will be performed and how it will be brought to life.

It lays out in very general terms, in some cases, areas almost of concern. It
says, credit ratings agencies, that's not working real well. Go study that
issue and figure out what to do about it. Or it seems to us that it’s a little
bit of a problem that investment advisers are not required to act in the
interest of their clients. Think about it.

So there's this tremendous amount of work that the regulatory agencies now need
to do to hammer out those questions and decide what this new system actually
will look like.

GROSS: So in some ways the battle is just beginning and there's a lot more
opportunity for lobbyists to have their way?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Absolutely. And, in fact, lobbyists have a huge advantage in
this next phase of the battle because the regulatory agencies, even more than
Congress, are hungry for information and rationales. The best thing you can
give a regulatory agency is a rationale for the decision that they're going to
make. So you hand them the data and show them, they crave this. They crave the
ability to defend the decisions that they make. And the industry is very, very
good at providing the data and the rationale for the decisions that it wants
agencies to make.

So we're about to see this huge new phase in the lobbying battle where the
industry and advocates for consumers will again be facing off and trying to
convince regulatory agencies to interpret the law in the way that they want.
And historically this is a venue in which the industry has had the upper hand.

GROSS: So since there's so many of the details yet to be worked out and the
lobbyists are moving in and what kind of timetable are we looking at? Like,
when are we likely to see actual regulations from the regulatory agencies
kicking in?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Some of the earliest visible consequences of this legislation
probably will start to emerge about a year from now - that's when the new
consumer agency will be set up, for example. But the first material thing that
it does, which may well be a new set of rules regarding the disclosures that
customers receive when they apply for mortgage loans, won't come out for at
least two years. So, you know, we're going to have a couple years of set up to
get this up and running and it may be several years before we really start to
see the effect of it on our lives as customers or on the financial industry.

GROSS: So it’s possible that Obama won't be reelected and there will be a
Republican president in place by the time a lot of the regulations written by
the new regulatory agencies are put into effect. And it's possible that a
Republican president would put into regulatory agencies people who are
ideologically opposed to regulation - it wouldn’t be the first time. Thus, kind
of toning down the kind of regulations that were supposed to be put into
effect? I mean is that a risk that the Obama administration is taking with this
approach to regulation?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Absolutely. Administration officials describe it as a necessary
risk. They say this is how the system works. Congress was never going to write
100,000 pages of financial regulations. The bill is already unbelievably long.
But the administration does view the end of the first term as a real deadline
and they're very determined to implement as much of this as they can before
that deadline.

The other power that they have is the power to appoint the heads of these
agencies - people who in many cases will have terms that outlast this first
presidential term. For example, the head of the new Consumer Bureau, it's a
five-year term. That shapes up as a critical appointment for the president. It
will really set the tone for how this new agency moves out into the world and
what issues it decides to focus on. And that person will have five years to
make those decisions before any subsequent president can put their own stamp on
that agency.

GROSS: So this new regulatory agency that's supposed to oversee things from a
consumer point of view, there's some speculation that the person who will be
chosen to head it will be Elizabeth Warren, who now heads the Congressional
Oversight Panel, overseeing the TARP money. And she is also an expert on credit
cards from a consumer point of view and a professor of law at Harvard. Some
people would like to see her have that position, especially since she advocated
for the creation of this agency. I think she actually suggested that such an
agency be created. At the same time, there's speculation that Timothy Geithner,
the treasury secretary, does not want her appointed.

What have you heard about the odds of Elizabeth Warren getting that position
and the behind the scenes disagreements about her?

Mr. APPELBAUM: Elizabeth Warren wrote a paper in 2007 in which she noted that
the federal government does a much better job protecting people who buy toaster
ovens than it does people who buy mortgages or borrow money to buy a home, and
suggested the idea of creating a federal agency solely devoted to protecting
borrowers.

President Obama embraced that idea in his plan for financial reform and Warren
has been its leading cheerleader throughout the process. A lot of people - a
lot of consumer advocates, liberal senators and representatives feel like she
is far and away the best candidate to run this agency because she has an
empathy for consumers that's really been lacking in the regulatory apparatus
here in Washington.

Her critics feel that she is an academic with no management experience and that
she doesn’t have the necessary - sufficient sympathy for the industry that she
would be regulating.

This is shaping up as kind of a defining battle in this implementation phase
for the financial regulation. The question of whether President Obama appoints
Elizabeth Warren or not is going to be seen by a lot of people as beginning to
define how the administration intends to take this bill and make it real and
concrete. And it is the case that Warren has not always gotten along well with
Secretary Geithner, although the Treasury has been careful to insist in recent
days that it has nothing but respect for her.

But it's a real political dilemma for the administration. They can gratify
their liberal base and anger banks or they can take a more moderate approach.
And I think we're all waiting to see which way it goes. She's one of the
finalists for the job but it's by no means clear that she could get confirmed
by Congress and whether or not that's a place where the administration wants to
take a stand I think will be a pretty interesting and defining choice for them
to make.

GROSS: My guest is Binyamin Appelbaum, a financial reporter for The New York
Times. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Binyamin Appelbaum, a financial reporter for The New York
Times.

I feel like the whole philosophy of banking has changed when it comes to, you
know, just like your average saver and checking account holder. It used to be,
like, you put your money in the bank, you'd get interest. And when you opened
up the account you'd get like a little gift.

But now I feel like you’re not getting interest and you’re being charged to
store your money. You’re being charged to take out your money. You go to your
average, you know, money machine and unless it’s like your bank, you have to
pay several dollars sometimes by the time all the fees are added up, just to
take out your own money.

Mr. APPELBAUM: It's interesting. You know, we're still coming to grips with the
extent to which our financial system has been transformed over the last couple
of decades by a thoroughgoing deregulation. Time was that financial companies
were highly specialized and tightly regulated and the bank was a place that
took in money, paid interest on that money, loaned it out generally to
businesses, and made, you know, charged a higher rate of interest to those
businesses. The difference was sufficient to pay for the bank president's house
and the employees and all of that, and it was a profitable - a modestly
profitable business.

That business model no longer exists. Banks now compete with a variety of other
financial institutions which have the same power to collect money from
customers, which in many instances can offer better, more attractive interest
rates for that money, like mutual fund companies with their money market
accounts. And banks are under tremendous pressure on the other hand to find
customers for their loans. So no one is trying to make money anymore and that
old fashioned business of just collecting money from customers and loaning it
out to businesses, except for small community banks.

The big players in this industry now make money by charging fees. They make
money by convincing customers to provide money at low cost and investing that
money in a wide range of other enterprises. The term bank doesn’t have its
narrow meaning anymore.

We have a range of financial companies, some of which are called banks, some of
which are called mutual funds, some of which are called General Electric or
AIG, and they're all basically doing the same things and they're all competing
with each other.

GROSS: So should I be expecting to pay more fees for my checking account or to
take money out of the money machine in spite of all the new regulations that
are coming into play now?

Mr. APPELBAUM: On the one hand, banks have a very strong incentive and have
said pointedly that they intend to charge fees to a larger share of their
customers. So there is a good chance that you will be, you know, asked to pay a
monthly fee for a checking account.

Bank of America said that it's considering a product where customers would be
charged if they need to visit a teller. And that's a model that the banks have
dabbled with for years but that now may become more prevalent, where basic
services are free but anything additional - like on airlines, where you’re now
paying to stow your bag, you’re paying for the window seat, your paying for the
snack - banks may tilt toward that model as well.

The countervailing force is that we will now have this new regulatory agency
that is in charge of making sure that those fees are fair and reasonable. So
the days of being charged 39.95 because you used your debit card at Starbucks
and overdrew your account by five cents probably are over as well.

GROSS: So what you’re saying is we’ll be getting lots of smaller fees and fewer
big penalty fees.

Mr. APPELBAUM: That seems to be where we're headed, yeah.

GROSS: So it seems like the banks are starting to rebound from the collapse of
a couple of years ago. But a lot of the rest of the economy is not. City and
state governments are suffering. There's still a large amount of unemployment,
a lot of small businesses are having trouble, a lot of large businesses are
having trouble. So is the banking industry rebounding in a way that most of the
rest of America isn't - and if so, why?

Mr. APPELBAUM: There's this tremendous irony that the industry that lead us
into this crisis - the financial industry - has come out of it ahead of the
rest of the economy and now appears to be - not all banks but many of them,
certainly many of the largest banks are prospering again, posting substantial
profits, starting to hire new employees and gear back up. And the reason for it
is quite simple: banks are intermediaries. They're the channel through which
economic activity passes and they profit from volume rather than outcomes.

So banks can do well even when the economy as a whole is doing poorly as long
as there's movement and motion and people shunting money from one place to
another. And what we're seeing right now is that the economy is flailing and
suffering and struggling, but banks are still finding plenty of opportunities
to trade money and to collect it from one place and give it out in another.

And this tremendous problem, which was in many ways at the root of the
financial crisis, which is that banks and other financial companies are not
sufficiently invested in the outcomes of the decisions that they make, is now
manifesting itself in the fact that they are prospering while the economy that
they ultimately serve is struggling. And it's a very profound question about
how you make sure that those interests are aligned. Clearly they're not right
now.

GROSS: Well, Binyamin Appelbaum, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. APPELBAUM: My pleasure.

GROSS: Binyamin Appelbaum is a financial reporter for The New York Times.
You'll find links to his recent articles about financial reform on our website,
freshair.npr.org.
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'Cookbook Collector': Updated Austen Hits The Spot

TERRY GROSS, host:

National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman has often been celebrated by
reviewers as a contemporary counterpart to Jane Austen. In novels like
"Intuition," "Paradise Park" and "Kaaterskill Falls," that comparison has been
made because of Goodman's astute attention to manners and characters, but now
in her new novel, "The Cookbook Collector," Goodman makes her debt to Austen
explicit by transporting "Sense and Sensibility" to the Silicon Valley of the
1990s.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says there's more going on here than mere
imitation.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: There's a luscious party scene about two-thirds of the way
through "The Cookbook Collector" in which a group of young-ish, very clever
people gather in an exquisite mansion in Northern California. Champagne and
strawberries are served, and the afternoon light turns golden as the day wanes.

That scene, for me, captures the overall mood and appeal of Allegra Goodman's
new novel. It's shimmering and astute and a little melancholy. In short, it's a
midsummer's dream of a novel. There's even a nearby enchanted forest thrown in,
in this case filled with giant California redwoods rather than Arden's ferns
and faeries.

"The Cookbook Collector" is about all kinds of appetites - for love, and sex,
and God and money, and of course food. The story revolves around two sisters.
Jess, a beautiful 23-year-old graduate student in philosophy, hops impulsively
from passion to passion. In contrast, we're told that Jess's older sister,
Emily, is possessed of a serene rationality. At only 28, Emily is the
multimillionaire CEO of a dot-com startup. If that flighty sister versus level-
headed sister premise sounds familiar, it should. Goodman herself has called
her latest novel a "Sense and Sensibility" for the digital age.

I confess, if anyone other than Allegra Goodman had made that claim, I very
likely would have tossed my review copy away. I am very weary of the literary
fad of contemporary authors shoplifting plots and characters from the 19th
century fiction warehouse. Poor Jane Austen, in particular, has been plucked
clean. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out your local
bookstore, where you'll find the latest violations, "Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters." Is there no shame?

But Goodman, as she always does, makes a believer out of this skeptic. Goodman
says of one of her characters, a brilliant computer programmer, that he had an
acquisitive intelligence, and when he appropriated an idea, he improved it,
until his own version obliterated its source. Of course I wouldn't go that
insanely far in praising Goodman's update of Austen, but I will say that this
homage quickly comes to have a glorious life of its own.

Jess, the faint reincarnation of impulsive Marianne Dashwood, bicycles around
the Berkeley of the 1990s - when the novel is set - flitting from philosophy to
veganism to tree saving. When Jess begins working part-time at a used and rare
bookstore called Yorick's, run by a wealthy, single, middle-aged man called
George, we Austen-savvy readers anticipate that wedding bells may eventually
ring. But not before fresh complications ensue - especially since Jess is
already involved with a charismatic radical environmentalist.

Here's George musing resentfully at the sight of Jess and her hipster
boyfriend: Why was it, George asked himself, that the youngest, most innocent-
looking women consorted with the creepiest men? Their boyfriends were not boys
or friends at all, but shadowy familiars - bears, wolfhounds, panthers.

George himself has buried his own animal appetites in books, although Jess's
entry into his life - and the incursion of the Internet into the book trade -
is making George rethink his monastic ways and the all-too-rare pleasures of
reuniting a customer with a long-sought-after copy of, say, "Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance."

Goodman's nimble language, usually displayed in her characters' sharp readings
of one another, is one of the great pleasures of her writing. The other is her
ability to integrate serious metaphysical questions into her entertaining
comedies of manners. The way in which "The Cookbook Collector" ultimately veers
off from a mere riff on "Sense and Sensibility" raises crucial doubts about the
value of a well-ordered life, as well as the existence of a benevolent God.

In Austen's original, Elinor, the practical one, was rewarded for having two
feet on the ground. That was the late Enlightenment talking through Austen. But
here, in Goodman, modernity pulls the rug out from under Emily's feet.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "The Cookbook Collector" by Allegra Goodman. You can read an excerpt
on our website, freshair.npr.org, where you can also download podcasts of our
show.
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