Elizabeth Warren

MELROSE, Mass. - Wall Street's philosophy in one of the nation's most hotly contested Senate campaigns could be boiled down to an old proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The financial industry has poured more than $6.2 million in contributions into the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts between incumbent Republican Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, who has made the fight against Wall Street greed and corruption a cornerstone of her campaign. Nearly $9 of every $10 have gone to Brown, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

President Obama, sidestepping a possibly heated confirmation battle, will appoint Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to the Treasury Department to launch the government's powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to two Democratic officials familiar with the decision. Warren could still be nominated as the director, but the Treasury appointment will allow her to shape the formation of the agency in the coming months, a top priority of Obama, without waiting for Senate approval, the officials said late Wednesday.

Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti's call last week for a "People's Pledge" - to limit spending by outside groups in the mayor's race - hails from Massachusetts, where a similar pact got mixed reviews from the Boston Globe. The Boston newspaper editorialized after the recent U.S. Senate showdown between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown that an agreement between the candidates tamped down so-called independent expenditures. But one of the newspaper's columnists, Jeff Jacoby, said the pact, which required the candidates to counter any outside spending on their behalf by sending half the amount in a donation to charity, limited third-party spending only to a point.

In nominating former Ohio Atty. Gen. Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, President Obama avoided the highly controversial choice of liberal favorite Elizabeth Warren — but not the controversy. Cordray, 52, was one of the most aggressive state officials in taking on the banking and the mortgage industries after the financial crisis. And in the eyes of some opponents of the agency in Congress and on Wall Street, he's no better a choice to direct the powerful new agency than Warren would have been.

House Republicans proposed watering down the powerful top job at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as they attacked Obama administration advisor Elizabeth Warren, accusing her of overstepping her temporary position overseeing the bureau. The new agency is the centerpiece of the financial regulatory overhaul enacted last year, but two leading Republicans said they would introduce legislation to change the bureau's still-vacant position of director to a five-member bipartisan commission.

Elizabeth Warren needs to kick some serious financial booty. There it is ? my advice to the nation's new consumer czar. Warren is now in the process of setting up a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which will oversee credit cards, mortgages and other meat-and-potatoes money matters. Congress has granted the bureau fairly broad powers to safeguard ordinary folk from the more rapacious and abusive practices of banks and other financial-services companies, such as payday lenders.

The federal government is unwrapping its most potent weapon yet in the battle to keep businesses from defrauding consumers: a powerful new agency designed to police nearly every type of transaction in hopes of avoiding another financial crisis. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, opening Thursday, is the first major agency launched in Washington in nearly a decade and the first since the early 1970s that is specifically focused on American consumers. Its controversial creation — still opposed by most Republicans and much of the financial industry — is the culmination of years of efforts by consumer advocates to get the government to play a greater role in overseeing credit cards, mortgages and other financial products.

NEW YORK -- It was a tough election for Wall Street. Not only did the candidate it bet against , President Obama, win reelection, but the financial industry's nemesis Elizabeth Warren ascended to power as a U.S. senator. How will Wall Street make nice with Washington Democrats? Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., may have launched a charm offensive. Dimon told CNBC Friday afternoon that he called Warren to congratulate her on her victory over Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican from Massachusetts.  During her campaign, Warren called for Dimon to step down as a member of the board of the New York Federal Reserve.