經濟廣角:Geithner Takes Regulators to Task on Turf&nbs

WASHingTON — In what has become a routine spectacle, financial regulators went to Congress this week and raised objections to major portions of President Obama’s plan to overhaul financial industry rules.

The dissident regulators — senior officials at the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — told the Senate banking committee on Tuesday that the new consumer protection agency the president proposes to transfer some of their authority to would never be as effective as they have been.

But instead of modifying or withdrawing the plan, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, has taken the regulators to task, warning them that they are partly responsible for the economic crisis and that their public objections are playing into the hands of industry groups seeking to kill the plan, officials involved in those discussions said.

Mr. Geithner also told the regulators that if the plan fails in Congress, it will be partly a consequence of their public challenges, which coincide with the views of the banks they supervise.

Mr. Geithner, in a brief interview on Wednesday, said he was confident that Congress in the end would adopt legislation embracing the administration’s core principles. He said it was understandable that the regulators had tried to preserve their jurisdiction over consumer issues.

But he said he also warned them not to lose sight of the broader objective — getting approval of legislation that all of them largely support — instead of being used by opponents of the plan to kill or substantially dilute the legislation because of relatively modest policy differences.

“I have told them, ‘Don’t let your effort to defend your turf add to the complexity of getting legislation done,’ ” Mr. Geithner said. “I said, ‘You all have a huge amount of credibility at stake.’ ”

Banks and regulators have resisted a proposal to create a new agency to regulate credit cards, mortgages and other consumer debt. Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, has told Congress that it would be better policy for the central bank to continue to write the consumer product rules. Sheila C. Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, have said that bank examiners at their agencies should continue to be the primary enforcer of consumer protection laws at those banks they already regulate for safety and soundness issues.

Ms. Bair, Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Dugan all head up independent agencies and were originally appointed by President George W. Bush.

Industry lobbyists could not be happier about the regulators’ opposition.

“It’s entirely appropriate for the senior bank regulators, which lead independent agencies, to express different views because it makes for better policy making,” said Camden R. Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers Association. “They are team players — for the American people and for the banking industry. Just because they disagree over certain provisions does not mean that they do not share the same goals as the administration, which is creating a better system. They just have different approaches.”

Edward L. Yingling, the veteran top lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, said that no one should be surprised by the public challenges to the proposal that have been raised by regulators. “Each of these people are known commodities and people on the Hill and you and others know where they are coming from and their philosophies,” he said. “John Dugan was Republican counsel of the banking committee. Sheila has had strong views since she arrived at the F.D.I.C.. Ben Bernanke is very highly respected.”

But the public dissent, which brought to the surface long-running debates that had been going on behind closed doors while the administration was drafting its plan, has taken senior Obama aides by surprise. The administration fears that it feeds industry opposition that has delayed action in the House and reinforced challenges in an already hostile Senate.

Administration officials, confirming an account first disclosed in The Wall Street Journal, said Mr. Geithner upbraided top regulators at a Treasury meeting for airing their views. The participants included Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Dugan and Ms. Bair.

One participant in the meeting said that the bank regulators felt that Mr. Geithner treated them like children being reprimanded by a parent. But the meeting appeared to do little to discourage the regulators from once again returning to Congress to express their concerns with elements of the plan, as Mr. Dugan and Ms. Bair did on Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee.

There is a rich history of independent regulators taking positions that have frustrated the administrations they served. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to remove a conservative member of the Federal Trade Commission in 1933 over policy disagreements, leading to a landmark Supreme Court decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that limited the authority of the president to dismiss leaders of independent agencies for such reasons.

L. William Seidman, the top regulator of savings and loan institutions during that industry’s crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, was a frequent public critic of proposals by the first Bush administration, and often ran political circles around senior officials. He once ridiculed a White House proposal to levy new fees on bank depositors to pay for the bailout, calling it a “toaster tax” because, instead of the banks giving a toaster to new depositors, the bank would take one. The appellation stuck and killed the proposal outright.

More recently, William H. Donaldson was pressured by the White House to step down as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission after his endorsement of proposals that administration officials opposed.