Government Regulation

If the auto industry thinks it has problems now, wait until Barack Obama takes the wheel. Not long after assuming the presidency, Obama is expected to grant a waiver allowing California and more than a dozen other states to enforce their own greenhouse-gas emission standards on autos.

Savers have long been able to take advantage of the above-average interest rates that weak banks pay to attract deposits. But those days may soon be over. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Tuesday proposed new limits on rates paid by banks that have less-than-adequate capital. The agency would throw out its current complicated formulas for determining maximum interest rates at weak banks and replace them with a relatively simple formula: The new cap for each product would be 0.

Car companies brought more than just new vehicles to this year's Washington Auto Show. Executives at Volkswagen and Toyota Motor Corp., for instance, put their political goals on stage alongside fancy concept cars in their push for unified national fuel-efficiency and vehicle emission standards.

Clothing and toy manufacturers launched a fresh effort Wednesday aimed at postponing enforcement of a law set to take effect next week that forces items that may contain dangerous amounts of lead to be pulled from shelves. The manufacturers want to delay for at least six months the effective date of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed by Congress last year in response to a string of toy recalls.

The chief watchdog for the U.S. Treasury's $700-billion bailout will ask bank executives not only to describe how they are using the funds but also to certify their answers under threat of criminal penalties, he said in an interview Wednesday. Neil J. Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said his intent was to shed more light on the workings of the widely criticized program.

The Federal Trade Commission's new Internet-advertising guidelines don't put enough pressure on companies to protect consumer data used in targeted marketing campaigns, privacy advocacy groups said. The agency released the voluntary standards Thursday to guide Web marketers' efforts at self-regulation. The FTC report urged advertising providers such as Google Inc.

To find ground zero of L.A's outdoor advertising wars, a good place to start is the Los Angeles City Council's 5th District -- or more specifically, a two-mile stretch of Westwood Boulevard. Your first stop would be Westwood at Wilshire Boulevard, where supergraphics -- large vinyl images -- are stretched across opposite sides of a 12-story medical building.

For weeks, President Obama has been pushing hard on his plan to revive the nation's economy, driving the $787-billion stimulus package through Congress, following up with a plan for homeowners facing foreclosure and readying a strategy for reviving the moribund credit system.

A growing number of healthy bank chains across the country are bailing out of the $700-billion federal banking bailout program, saying it has tarnished the reputation of banks that took the money and tangled them in unwieldy regulations. When the program began last fall, it was billed by then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson as an investment in strong banks to make them even stronger.

Last spring, Drew Boyles got the news that his junk-hauling operation would have to pay as much as $510,000 to retrofit its 17 diesel trucks under new state anti-pollution rules. The El Segundo business owner, who runs several 1-800-Got-Junk? franchises, said he feared that buying equipment to curb diesel exhaust for his entire fleet would put him "in grave financial distress."