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**August 6, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Progressives Run the Table on Regulatory Posts

****

I've covered lots of administrations, focusing on the regulation of
capitalism. And I've never seen anything remotely like this.

Start with the resurrection of antitrust, left for dead after Robert
Bork got through with it in the Reagan era. The incomparable Lina Khan
heads the FTC, and another stalwart, Jonathan Kanter, will be assistant
attorney general for antitrust.

Khan, while still in her 20s, wrote the authoritative law journal
article
on how antitrust could be applied to the big platform monopolies. And
Kanter is the lawyer you retain

when your company is being savaged by one the monopolies Khan
describes.  It doesn't get any better.

Meanwhile, Tim Wu, one of the smartest big-picture competition policy
people in the world, coordinates this stuff at the White House, while
Bharat Ramamurti, former chief economic adviser to Elizabeth Warren,
handles it at the National Economic Council. There has been nothing like
this since the Roosevelt era.

The news is equally good on the financial regulation front, where one
top job after another has gone to progressives. The latest two such
posts

about to be filled are Graham Steele to be assistant secretary of the
treasury for financial institutions, and Saule Omarova to be comptroller
of the currency, the key regulator of national banks.

This Treasury job, even under Democrats, usually goes to people
congenial to Wall Street. Steele is different. He has been chief banking
counsel to Sen. Sherrod Brown, and currently heads the Corporations and
Society Initiative at Stanford Law School. He once worked for Public
Citizen (yes, that Public Citizen.) He is a major proponent of tougher
regulation under existing Dodd-Frank provisions, including greater
attention to the risks in bank investments in carbon related industries.

The comptroller job has been vacant, following a center-versus-left
standoff between the candidacies of Michael Barr, who had the assistant
treasury secretary for finance job under Tim Geithner, and Mehrsa
Baradaran, a progressive law professor at the University of California
at Irvine, and author of two important books, How the Other Half Banks,
and The Color of Money. In the end, neither got the job.

Omarova
,
who teaches banking law at Cornell, has been a critic of
crypto-currency, and of the blurring of the traditional bright line
between banking and commerce. She has also written

for the Prospect on the case for a National Investment Authority.

How did we get so fortunate? One can point to progressive loyalty to
Biden, the evolution in Biden's own thinking, and to the good work of
a couple of invisible hands-namely those of Elizabeth Warren and
Sherrod Brown.

Some on the left are concerned that progressives have been too easily
inclined to go along with Biden. Maybe that's because progressives are
winning-at least in areas such as top-level appointments where Biden
is able to deliver.

Sixty votes in the Senate for progressive legislation? Biden's on
board, but that's a little harder.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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