High-frequency trading — using computer algorithims to trade stocks by the millisecond — has exploded in recent years. One Democratic Rep. is urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to do something about it, using a law that he authored more than two decades ago:

Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has waged a decades-long struggle against computerized trading sent the SEC a hint: The power to curb high-frequency trading has been within its grasp all along.

In his letter, Markey described a law he co-sponsored in 1989 to increase the agency’s power to regulate computerized trading, a precursor to HFT that employed computer programs to make trading decisions without the participation of conscious humans. The law lets the SEC “limit practices which result in extraordinary levels of volatility,” according to Markey’s citation.

Markey, nudging further, added: “If the commission simply makes a finding that the markets are currently in a period of extraordinary market volatility and that HFT is reasonably certain to engender such levels of volatility, the Commission can immediately promulgate rules that restrict or eliminate the practice.”

This chart from the research firm Nanex illustrates how high-frequency trading has grown since 2007, spiking in the aftermath of the Great Recession:

High-speed trading now makes up more than half of the stock market’s volume. During one week in October, one trader alone made 4 percent of the stock market’s trades. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted, “The stock market is clearly more dangerous than it was in 2007, with much greater tail risk; meanwhile, in return for facing that danger, society as a whole has received precious little utility.”

In 2010, the Chicago Federal Reserve warned the SEC about the perils of high-speed trading. If Markey is right, the SEC has had the power to do something about it all along.

The Chicago City Council yesterday adopted a law that will revoke the license of businesses found to engage in wage theft. This addresses a key problem for the city, as a study of Chicago workers “found that over 60 percent of workers are underpaid by more than $1 an hour while 67 percent were not paid their legally required overtime rate.”

In the last decade, wage theft complaint have exploded, increasing 400 percent around the country. Overtime wage theft complaints hit a record high in 2011 and likely exceeded the record again in 2012.

A 2009 report showed that more than two-thirds of low-income employees experienced a wage law violation in just the previous week. “The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented immigrants,” said Nik Theodore, an author of the study and a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”

As Salon’s Josh Eidelson reported, “Recent years have seen increasing traction for campaigns to strengthen wage theft penalties and remedies. Those efforts have also inspired a counter-attack: Last year, Florida Republicans and big businesses pushed a bill that would have overridden local wage theft measures. ” (HT: Ned Resnikoff)

The U.S. is currently experiencing its worst flu season in a decade, but many workers can’t heed the advice of public health experts to stay home when they’re sick due to a lack of paid sick days. And Florida business leaders are looking to keep it that way:

The Florida Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday that one of its top legislative priorities this year would be blocking local governments from adopting paid sick-time measures such as the one pending in Orange County.

At a news conference in Tallahassee, Chamber President Mark Wilson said his powerful business group wants a law that would ban cities and counties from creating varying paid-sick-leave rules across the state.

The passage of local sick-time laws would, Wilson said, “make pockets of Florida very uncompetitive.”

Conservatives have spent a significant amount of effort to block paid sick days laws in Florida and elsewhere in the country. Wisconsin Republicans even went so far as to pass a law preventing any city in the state from passing a paid sick days law after Milwaukee adopted one.

But the complaints from businesses about paid sick days making Florida “uncompetitive” ring hollow. As Jane Farrell and Joanna Ventnor noted, “A study of Connecticut’s policy mandating five days of sick leave found that full use of this leave would cost an employer only 0.4 percent of their sales revenue on average. Without paid sick days, employees come to work unhealthy, costing employers $160 billion per year due to lower productivity levels.”

40 percent of private sector workers, 79 percent of food workers, and 80 percent of low-income workers have no paid sick days. The U.S. is alone in the developed world in not mandating some sort of paid sick leave for workers. And Florida’s business community is doing its best to keep it that way, despite the consequences.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) did not hesitate to attack his fellow House Republicans after they refused to hold a vote on providing disaster relief funds to states affected by Hurricane Sandy. After public shaming, the House finally passed a bare-bones aid package on January 4.

But King has not forgotten his colleagues who tried to block funds for the devastated regions of New York and New Jersey. On Friday morning, King recalled in a WOR-AM interview with Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) how he and the rest of the New York delegation were made to feel like “third world beggars”:

[King] cited a New Jersey congressman who said on the floor that Congress now needs a “hypocrites conference” for those whose states received funding the past and now sought to deny the New York region what it was seeking.

“Quite frankly it’s going to be difficult going back and working with people you sit next to and whenever they were in need, we responded immediately,” he said. “Not one member of Congress ever voted against or said one word in opposition to aid going to other states when the money was needed. We were going around like third world beggars. At least they put us in that position.”

After House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) cancelled the Sandy vote at the last minute, King railed that Republicans had “put a knife in the back of New Yorkers.” Indeed, more than half of the 67 Republicans who voted against Sandy aid previously lobbied for disaster funding for their own states before turning on New York and New Jersey. In the interview, King raged against the injection of politics into a crisis that left his home state in shambles for over two months before Congressional action.

King went on to praise Cuomo’s passage of a tough gun regulation bill vehemently denounced by many Congressional Republicans.

House Republicans are apparently starting to get the message that not raising the nation’s debt limit would cause an economic crisis, as they are reportedly considering a plan that would raise the limit. But they would do so, according to a Bloomberg report, only until April 15, meaning the country will face a similar situation in just three months. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) confirmed the report later, saying, “Next week, we will authorize a three month temporary debt limit increase to give the Senate and House time to pass a budget.”

Such a plan runs counter to the claims Republican leaders have made for the last two years. Speaker John Boehner (R) and other Republicans have repeatedly blamed “uncertainty” for crushing job and economic growth. Here are a few examples:

– BOEHNER: “There is no question that the private sector in America right now sees all of this uncertainty coming out of Washington: new rules, new regulations and no idea what the tax rates are going to be at the end of next year,” he says. “I was with a group of employers in my own district yesterday who are very concerned about investing more in their business at a time of great uncertainty and I think government needs to help bring some certainty.”

– REP. PAUL RYAN (R-WI): “We should not have a government that stands in the way,” Ryan said during a campaign event in Virginia. “We should have policies that help small businesses grow and create jobs.” [...] “What is the President doing?” Ryan poised to his audience. “More regulations, more uncertainty, more borrowing, more spending, more taxing.”

– REP. ERIC CANTOR (R-VA): “Small businesses in particular, the backbone of our economy, face a cloud of uncertainty. This uncertainty prevents these entrepreneurs from taking a risk, from starting a business, and creating jobs.”

Setting up repeated debt ceiling fights isn’t ideal, given how costly they can be for the fragile economy. Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 cost the nation an estimated $18.9 billion and at least a million jobs. It also created the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which set up another showdown at the end of the year that was ultimately pushed back three months to March.

Republican fears of uncertainty aren’t backed up by their actions. In the two years they have controlled Congress, America has reached the brink of a government shutdown, narrowly avoided default, and nearly gone over the “fiscal cliff,” leading President Obama to exclaim in a press conference last week that “we’ve got to stop lurching from crisis to crisis to crisis.” A three-month debt ceiling fix, though, would only increase the odds of another crisis this spring, when the prospect of a government shutdown and the fiscal cliff’s automatic spending cuts are also back on the table.

A new U.S. women’s soccer league will be launching this year, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the game following the U.S. women’s national team’s 2012 Olympic gold medal. And one of the stars of that medal run — striker Alex Morgan — wants to make sure that the players in the new league have a strong collective bargaining position:

“We’re still looking to finalize our negotiations with U.S. Soccer, both the women’s national team contract and the [contract with the] league,” Morgan said of the details still to be worked out for the national team as a whole and the participation of those players, subsidized by U.S. Soccer, in the NWSL. “And we’re hoping that is going to be solved in a timely manner so we can focus all of our efforts on the league and getting it started in March.” [...]

“When I was drafted [in WPS], I wasn’t really sure what went on and what kind of salaries are given, what the quality of the team was — not only in terms of players, but coaching staff, training staff, training facility, that sort of stuff,” Morgan said. “Now being on this side of it, we really wanted to not only fight for us, but also those players not on the national team that didn’t really have a say. We had to be their voice. I think it’s finding that middle ground between sacrificing a little bit of what we want for the betterment of the league and for all of the players.“

Morgan has some familiarity with problematic collective bargaining: the women’s national team has a shoddier agreement with U.S. soccer than the men’s national team, which, among other things, results in worse airline accommodations for the women.

Already, another star women’s soccer player, Abby Wambach, is warning that salaries in the new league will be so low that players may have to hold down other jobs in order to get by. But a strong collective bargaining agreement can help ensure that’s not the case forever.

Many of the nation’s largest banks have, in the last few weeks, signed settlements with the federal government over a variety of foreclosure abuses. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley will all be paying up, as will a slew of other banks who joined an $8.5 billion settlement.

However, tucked away in these settlements is a problem: the costs are tax-deductible. As the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson explained, “the banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads.” At least two U.S. senators think that taxpayers shouldn’t have to cover the cost of the banks’ mistakes:

“The government is abetting the behavior by not preventing the deduction,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “The taxpayers end up subsidizing the Wall Street banks after the headlines of a big-dollar settlement die down. That’s unfair to taxpayers.” [...]

At least one lawmaker, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, wants regulators to bar the tax deductibility of the lenders’ costs. Brown made his argument in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry and other top regulators. The Fed and the comptroller’s office, a Treasury Department agency, negotiated the foreclosure abuse settlements with the banks.

“It is simply unfair for taxpayers to foot the bill for Wall Street’s wrongdoing,” Brown wrote in the letter dated Thursday. “Breaking the law should not be a business expense.”

The latest round of bank settlements has already been panned by critics for letting banks “sweep past abuses under the rug.” And now taxpayers are subsidizing the slight cost that the banks will be paying.

Airline manufacturer Boeing’s newest plane, the 787 Dreamliner, is grounded around the world due to concerns over the lithium battery on which it relies. On January 7, a battery caught fire inside a parked Dreamliner in Japan, raising concerns that similar problems may be prevalent in the new planes.

The Federal Aviation Administration, the airline industry’s regulator, relied heavily on data provided by Boeing showing that the lithium batteries “featured redundant safeguards that were essentially foolproof,” the Wall Street Journal reported this morning. And though the airline industry is safer today that it has ever been, the FAA is increasingly relying on airline manufacturers to regulate themselves because it has “neither the budget nor the expertise” to test battery systems and other aircraft features itself:

Such reliance on manufacturers in certifying new planes is the standard approach for the agency, which today oversees the safest airline fleet in history. But barely days after vouching for the jet’s safety, the FAA’s about-face is focusing renewed attention on how cutting-edge aircraft are brought into service. [...]

The aircraft-approval process has long been a give-and-take between manufacturer and regulator, with the two sides collaborating and sharing information. Compared with the industry, the FAA has neither the budget nor the expertise to do extensive testing on its own. Instead, it often designates company teams to do the bulk of the work, with FAA participation and oversight.

Lithium-ion batteries have never before been used in aircraft, but when Boeing developed its new system for use in the Dreamliner, it ultimately “had the lead in certifying the safety and reliability of the batteries,” the Journal reported. After 200,000 hours testing, the system received final approval from the FAA, which never re-evaluated its 2007 decision to approve the battery’s use. And so, last week, Boeing debuted an aircraft featuring never-before-used technology that it seemingly developed, certified, and regulated itself, with the FAA performing only in an “oversight” role.

The FAA isn’t alone. Allowing industries to self-regulate has become an increasingly common practice in an era of crunched budgets and shrinking staff sizes at enforcement agencies. The Department of Energy has considered outsourcing fracking regulations to the natural gas industry, even as concerns about the environmental implications of the practice continue to mount. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tested food safety reforms that would shift much of the responsibility for regulating poultry to manufacturers. Trial runs of the program found far higher rates of defects in approved poultry products than there were in samples reviewed by government regulators.

In the financial industry, regulatory agencies can’t afford to fill their staffs or enforce regulations, a problem that played an extensive role in the collapse of the housing market. With less oversight and more responsibility, banks rubber-stamped mortgage applications and foreclosure documents, committing fraud, abusing homeowners, and bringing the American economy to the brink of collapse in the process. Lack of oversight and regulation also played an extensive role in interest rate-rigging and money laundering scandals at large banks.

Some responsibility for regulation will inevitably fall to private companies, no matter how well-funded, staffed, and trained regulatory agencies are. But the concerns that have emerged with the Dreamliner are yet another indication that our regulatory agencies need to be fully-funded, and that leaving too much of the regulatory responsibility to private companies is a recipe for disaster for consumers.