Back to the Summers Blame Game

Frontline had a great program on our gal Brooksley Born, sometime head of the CFTC who tried to regulate the credit default swap market and was blown down by chief bloviator Larry Summers et al. and Sen. Phil Gramm (he of the late night Christmas 2000 law to "modernize" the CDS market by rendering it beyond the purview of regulation). It's on-line at PBS: The Warning. (Read about Brooksley at links provided in my May 26 post about her.)
It got me back in touch with my inner raging populist once again to ask the question: What the heck are Congress/White House doing to reform the financial markets? Brooksley answered this question in her Frontline interview: NADA!
What needs to be reformed? Two things, in my view:

1. The laws that require insurers, pension funds and mutual funds to rely on those heinous ratings agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch) for directing their investments. SEC anointed those three as the chosen few, even though they (ratings agencies) were paid by the issuers of the securities for the ratings that would determine how much interest the issuers would have to pay investors. (COI!) Even the FED got into the game, telling the banks it regulated that it could treat AAA securities as good as cash.
2. The easy money policy that led to the big pot of cash for investments in these doggy instruments.

Have you heard anything lately about either of these problems being fixed by Congress? by the FED? By Larry Summers? No? How shocking!