With unemployment topping 10.2%, and 50,000 Americans exhausting their unemployment benefits each week, President Obama is expected to sign a bill today to temporarily extend unemployment insurance payments. However the amount which families will be able to put toward the rent or the grocery bill from their unemployment checks depends as much on decisions in the state house as the White House.

Mr. President, I rise today because I am deeply concerned that just over one year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a failure that helped send us to the brink of depression, Wall Street is essentially unchanged. Congress and the SEC have not enacted any reforms.


 
 State insurance regulators yesterday voted in favor of using a new method to evaluate residential mortgage-backed securities that would allow them to reduce the capital requirements related to these investments. The proposal was pitched by the American Council of Life Insurers, which sought to change the way state regulators evaluate insurance carriers’ holdings of the bundled mortgages, said Jeremy Wilkinson, a spokesman for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.


 
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Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the bank bailout, was on Morning Joe Friday morning to dig in to the newly released unemployment report . The numbers are bleak — unemployment has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 — and Warren is not surprised.

Several major banks are fending off legislation meant to regulate the lucrative derivatives market by hiring a high-powered financial lobbyist. The Hill reports that Edward Rosen, a partner at the Cleary Gottlieb firm, has played a key role in derivatives legislation as Congress hones in on regulating the multi-billion-dollar market. Cleary Gottlieb reported close to $1 million this year lobbying for work on the derivatives market, and according to third-quarter lobbying disclosure reports, Rosen has worked in recent months for financial behemoths like HSBC Securities, Wells Fargo, Deustche Bank, Citigroup and Bank of America Securities