Post by Ken Grech, a top Simi Valley real estate agent. Search Simi Valley real estate listings. New York Times, By Sewell Chan
The Obama administration redoubled its efforts on Tuesday to overhaul the nation's financial regulations, saying it would not back down from its efforts to restrict the trading activities of banks and to create a consumer agency to regulate financial products.
In an attempt to thwart fierce lobbying against those measures, among others, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, summoned leaders of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Forum and other groups to a meeting on Thursday to urge them not to obstruct the legislative effort.
The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher J. Dodd, who is drafting a new version of the regulatory overhaul, met again on Tuesday with Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, in the hope of arriving at a bipartisan measure.
Other provisions in contention include whom to exempt from new regulations governing the market for over-the-counter derivatives and how to dissolve financial companies before they pose systemic risk to the economy.
The White House renewed its support for a ban on banks that take deposits from making market bets with their own money -- a practice known as proprietary trading. When Mr. Obama announced his support for that ban last month, he called it the ''Volcker rule,'' in honor of Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who has championed the idea.
''We're as committed to that now as we were on that day,'' the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said on Tuesday. ''We're not walking away from what the president outlined on the Volcker rule.''
But others involved said it might be difficult to persuade the Senate to go along. In December, the House adopted a plan with a provision to let federal regulators curb proprietary trading if they deem it too risky for banks.
Representative Paul E. Kanjorski, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who wrote that provision, said in an interview that ''the Volcker rule grows out of my amendment,'' and that they shared an aim: ''We're trying to re-establish credibility in the marketplace for financial institutions. They have, through this crisis, rightly or wrongly so, gained a dangerous reputation.''
But Mr. Kanjorski acknowledged that it had been tough to push his amendment through the House, and said that the Volcker rule went even further, because it gave less discretion to regulators.
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