Don’t Tread On Me: Washington Turf Wars

The Obama administration has two approaches to the economy: they want to grow it, but they also want to regulate it in new ways. A turf war has developed between President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a number of agencies, including the Federal Reserve, whose jurisdiction he’s treading on. This week financial regulators have gone to Congress to protest Geithner’s proposal to create a new agency to regulate credit cards, mortgages, and consumer debt. Stephen Labaton has been reporting on this bureaucratic battle for our partner The New York Times.