They say a broken clock is right twice a day.  With Elizabeth Warren, it might be just once a day.  But let us celebrate the singular occasion.

Senator Warren was “on fire” as she correctly pointed to the ridiculous last-minute insertion of New York bank-authored legislation jammed into the CR Omnibus bill.

The bill includes language repealing part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.  Now allowed will be derivatives trading by banks covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  All the angst and engineering of safeguards for the prevention of financial melts downs à la ’07 and ’08 are partially erased with this bank-authored provision, added to the bill like a pediatrician slipping a hypodermic into an unsuspecting child.  Ouch!  What just happened?

Elizabeth is correct to be upset.  The connection between NY and Washington, more specifically the financial industry and Congress, has never been cozier.  Nearly taking the nation down with an incestuous relationship among federally backed mortgages, brokerage house bundling, and deceptive sales practices, no one apparently broke the law.  Remarkable.  Perhaps there was a fine here and there, similar in nature to a bank robber being asked to replace some of the money.

During the Clinton years, banking personalities in that administration encouraged the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, thus allowing expanded interaction among brokerage, insurance, and banking.  That lasted ten years before the ’07 implosion.  Dodd-Frank was the response legislation to that meltdown.  Despite its flaws, and its suspicious authorship, it was an attempt to stave off future debacles.  Some of that quietly went away with the passage of this CR Omnibus bill.

Elizabeth might be confused about her high cheekbones and the entrepreneurial spirit, but she is correct to be upset here.  The offense of this recent legislative action is not necessarily the language of the bill and the allowance of derivative trading, but the clandestine nature of the process and the undoing of safeguards arduously crafted.

If there were indeed flaws in Dodd-Frank, fix it in the open, under the sunlight.  What happened here merely emphasizes the inbred relationship between the New York financial community and Congress.  Maybe money is involved.

So we now must wait and watch for the Elizabeth’s time piece to coincide once more with wisdom.  And wait, and wait…