Consumer Watchdog – Affordable Car & Home Insurance - Blog

The president talked and joked easily with America from Jay Leno's couch last night, as close to a fire side chat as it gets in these times. Leno is no Jon Stewart but Obama did offer some clues as to where his financial regulatory approach is going. 

After Enron's fraud on California during the 2001 electricity crisis became clear, a lot of politicians felt they had to give back their Enron contributions.  Our consumer group was the beneficiary of a few of those returned dollars, since we fought the energy industry's deregulation schemes.  Now Open Secrets reports AIG's contributions, from employees and related political action committees, to federal lawmakers totaled $9.3 million over the last decade, with an exact 50%-50% split between Democrats and Republicans. AIG sure knows how to hedge its bets.

The Office of Thrift Supervision took responsibility for its failure as AIG's primary regulator to prevent the company's accumulation of extreme risk in the years before its collapse.

I spent the morning watching a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing into what a ‘systemic risk regulator’ of the financial...

I know that the insurance industry likes to operate in the dark. It took a voter revolt at the ballot box and 20 years fighting to implement Proposition 103 to...

I was invited to speak on a panel about the financial crisis at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Insurance Legislators this weekend but also had a chance to weigh in on the growing use of education and occupation information by insurance companies...

Today's report in the Wall Street Journal that the Treasury Department may let insurance companies tap into the $700 billion bailout fund is more proof that the state of insurers' investment portfolios drive a lot of their corporate decisions.