by Calculated Risk on 9/19/2009 10:47:00 PM

From the NY Times: Leading Senator Pushes New Plan to Oversee Banks

[Sentator Dodd] is planning to propose the merger of four bank agencies into one super-regulator, an idea that is significantly different from what President Obama envisions.

... the bill Mr. Dodd is preparing to make public in the coming weeks would be more ambitious and politically risky than the plan offered by the White House, which considered but then decided against combining the four banking agencies — the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Comptroller of the Currency — into one superagency.
...
In the House, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a Democrat and the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, has been working on legislation that is closer to the Obama plan on consolidation of the agencies.
...
Mr. Dodd has also rejected the administration’s proposal to have the Fed play the leading role as a so-called “systemic risk” regulator that examines the connections between regulated and unregulated companies for trouble spots that could disrupt the markets.

There is no question that the regulatory agencies reacted slowly to the obvious increase in risky loans in 2003 and 2004. I think any proposal should explain how a new "superagency" would have caught these problems earlier.