As part of the Huffington Post's Road Forward series on President Obama's second term, I did a story on what Obama needs to do to make the financial system safer.
You can read the long version, with guest appearances by Sheila Bair, Neil Barofsky and many more, here. The short version is that Obama is not going to make any big steps on financial reform, but there are some relatively simple things he can do to at the very least make Dodd-Frank's reforms a reality.
So far, though, with the appointment of Jack Lew and the rumored appointment of Ruth Porat to Treasury, and a fifth seat on the SEC still sitting empty, it's not looking like Obama cares much at all about financial reform any more. Which is good news for financial journalists, and maybe horrible news for normal humans, because we're going to get another financial crisis out of it all.
Update: Almost forgot to add a link to the excellent companion piece by Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets. He puts "people" at the top of Obama's to-do list. Getting the right people in place is high on my list, too. "People are policy," Kelleher writes. That's what makes the appointments of Lew and maybe Porat so discouraging to reformers.