In a speech today, Federal Reserve Board member Jerome Powell said that lawmakers may want consider new measures to break up the nation’s biggest banks. While he has confidence in the new rules laid out by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, Powell said that “public discussion and evaluation of these ideas [to break up banks] is important”:

Some urge the adoption of more intrusive reforms, such as a return to Glass-Steagall-style activity limits, more stringent limits on size or systemic footprint, or a requirement that the largest institutions break up into much smaller pieces. I believe that public discussion and evaluation of these ideas is important. At a minimum, we need to thoroughly understand these alternatives in case the existing reform project falters. [...]

My own view is that the framework of current reforms is promising, and should be given time to work. In any case, too big to fail must end, even if more intrusive measures prove necessary in the end.

Federal Reserve Board member Daniel Tarullo also recently floated the idea of capping bank size as a percentage of the economy.

Last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) took to the Senate floor to excoriate banks that he believes are still too-big-to-fail. “Wall Street has been allowed to run wild for years. We simply cannot wait any longer for regulators to act. These institutions are too big to manage, they are too big to regulate, and they are surely still too big to fail,” he said. He’s been joined in his criticism recently by a diverse set of lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and David Vitter (R-LA).

According to data from the Dallas Federal Reserve, the largest 0.2 percent of banks — just 12 mega-institutions — now control nearly 70 percent of all banking assets. Just the six biggest banks holds assets that total 60 percent of the entire economy:

Bloomberg News recently estimated that the biggest banks receive a funding advantage of $83 billion annually simply by virtue of being perceived as too-big-to-fail. “Should those biggest financial institutions be repaying the American taxpayer that $83 billion subsidy that they are getting?” asked Warren last week.

Two weeks ago, a petition asking the White House to act on a recent Library of Congress decision that restricted consumer use of cell phones reached the required threshold for a response. The administration replied today by agreeing that it’s time to legalize cell phone unlocking:

The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties. In fact, we believe the same principle should also apply to tablets, which are increasingly similar to smart phones. And if you have paid for your mobile device, and aren’t bound by a service agreement or other obligation, you should be able to use it on another network. It’s common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers’ needs.

This is particularly important for secondhand or other mobile devices that you might buy or receive as a gift, and want to activate on the wireless network that meets your needs — even if it isn’t the one on which the device was first activated. All consumers deserve that flexibility.

Cell phone unlocking — allowing consumers control over the phone they paid for, like the ability to switch carriers but use the same device, or swap out their SIM card to avoid excessive roaming charges overseas — is prohibited under a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) that covers digital locks. The Library of Congress had previously issued exceptions to the provision in 2006 and 2010, but denied an renewal of the exception in fall of 2012.

While the White House cannot reverse the decision due a jurisdictional dispute outlined in the Library of Congress’ response to the White House statement, the White House endorsed a range of options to change the status quo, including “narrow legislative fixes” and examination of the issue by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also issued a statement today confirming they are looking into the issue because “it doesn’t pass the common sense test” among other reasons.

Federal regulators earlier this year cut a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks that short-circuited an earlier review of foreclosure abuses. The new deal is meant to provide $9.3 billion in aid to distressed homeowners, while foregoing a thorough review process.

However, as the New York Times noted, that $9.3 billion headline number is much higher than the amount homeowners will actually receive:

Under the settlement, banks receive credit for the size of the outstanding loan balance, rather than the amount of actual assistance provided. For example, if a bank cut a borrower’s $100,000 mortgage debt by $10,000, the lender could then reduce its commitment under the settlement by $100,000. In a previous foreclosure settlement, the banks received credit only for the $10,000.

This obviously incentivizes banks to give small amounts of aid to homeowners with large mortgages, tallying the larger amount under the settlement while not providing much in the way of help. As Karen Weise detailed at Businessweek, the settlement also gives banks a helping hand in a variety of other ways.

“All in all, the settlement moves further away from compensating borrowers and actually identifying mistakes banks may have made,” she wrote. The Times notes that regulators initially “declined to attach any conditions to the assistance,” and were then steamrolled by the banks when they sought to add conditions later.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, has called for an investigation into why regulators decided to stop the prior settlement’s foreclosure reviews and instead opt for a new settlement. And this is certainly not the first time that banks have been able to get away with stiffing homeowners under the guise of a settlement. Last year’s $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement has also been gamed by banks, while state legislators have siphoned off some of its funding for purposes other than helping homeowners.

The Associated Press’ Stephen Ohlemacher is out with an article lamenting the tax burden levied on the richest Americans who are “paying some of their biggest federal tax bills in decades even as the rest of the population continues to pay at historically low rates.”

The piece, which seeks to contextualize the political debate surrounding the deficit in economic data, devotes its first eight paragraphs to “the poor rich,” characterizing the current tax structure as a great burden on higher income Americans. It’s not until paragraph 16 that Ohlemacher departs from the article’s opening premise to mention that the income gap between the rich and everyone else has exploded, helping to create the difference in tax rates.

Ohlemacher kicks off his article about the “new analysis” from the Tax Policy Center by lamenting that “families with incomes in the top 20 percent of the nation will pay an average of 27.2 percent of their income in federal taxes,” while “The average family in the bottom 20 percent of households won’t pay any federal taxes” and can claim “more in credits than they owe in taxes.”

A quote from a fellow at the Center, which is described as a nonpartisan “research organization,” succinctly sums up the problem: “My sense is that high-income people feel abused by being targeted always for more taxes,” Roberton Williams tells Ohlemacher. “You can understand why they feel that way.”

To learn if middle class families feel “abused” in the current economy or why high income families pay as much as they do, the reader must skip past seven full paragraphs of political context about President Obama calling on Congress to close a “bunch of tax loopholes that are benefiting the well-off and the well-connected” (an idea that sounds absurd in light of the already unbearable tax burden), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rejecting that premise, and Democrats proposing a tax on “people making more than $1 million” to replace the sequester.

In paragraph 24, Ohlemacher finally presents a reason for the higher tax rates — though even this is delivered as an opinion from “Liberals and Democrats” and is not accorded the factual tone of Williams’ observation that the rich feel “abused.”

“Liberals and many Democrats say rich families can afford to pay higher taxes because their incomes have grown much more than incomes for middle- and low-income families,” Ohlemacher writes, quoting CBO data showing that “after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2009, increasing by 155 percent,” while “incomes for those in the middle increased by just 32 percent during the same period.”
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Yesterday, voters in Switzerland overwhelmingly approved new measures to clamp down on executive pay. Under the approved referendum — which means that the new provisions will be added to the Swiss constitution — shareholders will have the ability to veto executive pay packages, so-called “golden parachutes” will be outlawed, and executives who defy the rules could see jail time. As the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Peaple wrote, “Swiss voters’ anger is understandable. Like other countries, it has seen executive pay rise out of all proportion over the past decade”:

Switzerland has the highest remuneration per board member in Europe, according to Deloitte. Pharmaceutical company Novartis’s recent offer of a six-year $76 million golden parachute to outgoing Chairman Daniel Vasella is the latest example of seemingly egregious rewards. UBS Chairman Axel Weber was paid $5.3 million when he joined the bank this year. Compared with Swiss average wage of $73,500, such payments look out of whack.

The European Union has also approved new restrictions on bonuses at large financial firms.

Many of the same problems that led to Swiss frustration with CEO pay apply here in the U.S. For instance, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit walked off with millions of dollars after vaporizing most of his company’s value. Duke Energy paid its former CEO $44 million for working literally one day.

Skyrocketing executive pay (along with growing pay in the finance industry) is a huge component in America’s growing income inequality. In fact, “Executives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005.” Special tax deductions for executive pay cost taxpayers billions of dollars per year.

In the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, shareholders of U.S. corporations were also given new powers meant to rein in executive pay. However, Dodd-Frank only gives shareholders a non-binding vote, meaning that the corporation is able to essentially ignore it.

The corporate argument that huge executive pay packages are necessary to retain top talent has proven to be false. Yet the U.S. tax code preferences these pay packages, and there’s little shareholders (or anyone else) can do to stop them.

Corporate profits hit record highs in the second half of 2012, but that prosperity hasn’t led to the creation of jobs, since America’s biggest firms are sitting on stocks of cash instead of investing them back into the economy.

At the same time, wages hit record lows, and corporate earnings are rising nearly 20 times faster than disposable incomes, the New York Times reports:

As a percentage of national income, corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966. In recent years, the shift has accelerated during the slow recovery that followed the financial crisis and ensuing recession of 2008 and 2009, said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays.

Corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008, he said, but disposable income inched ahead by 1.4 percent annually over the same period, after adjusting for inflation.

From 2009 to 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits while just one percent went to workers’ wages, and hourly earnings for workers actually fell over that time. And while they aren’t investing in job growth, corporations are also paying taxes at a rate that hit a 40-year low in 2011.