Roiling Financial Regulation

Today's the day that Treasury Secretary Paulson publicly rolls out his plans, as I understand it, to turn the Federal Reserve into a super regulator of all things business and eliminate a number of independent agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although I'm all for trying to have one set of regulations for a given industry - for example, have mortgage lenders responsible to one agency - I think that has natural limitations. At issue is two aspects of firms: how they interact with the global financial infrastructure, and how they interact with shareholders.

The two topics are really separate. If you are focused, by your nature, on the greatest efficiency for doing business, you aren't necessarily looking at the need to keep company shareholders informed and making corporate decisions as transparent to the investors as possible. Putting everything under one roof could be a conflict of interests, and one side or the other might be slighted. Even if you wanted to argue for the combination of the two areas, would doing it under the Fed really be that wise? The agency is semi-autonomous and doesn't directly answer to the government, even if it must keep everyone informed of what it does. I'm not sure that I'd want more extensive power over markets and financial activities regulated by such a body.