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The SEC charges were leveled against Goldman Sachs just as the Congressional debate on regulating high finance is intensifying. CBS anchor Katie Couric invited best-selling non-fiction author Michael Lewis of The Big Short to speculate on the timing. Barack Obama had warned Wall Street: "Keep your nose out of the financial reform bill," Lewis paraphrased. High finance continued lobbying anyway so the SCE lawsuit "seems more than coincidental."
As for the partisan debate over new financial regulation, both CBS' Nancy Cordes and NBC's Savannah Guthrie laid out the talking points. Republicans argue that a $50bn bank-financed fund, to pay for the gradual liquidation of Wall Street firms that are too big to fail immediately, amounts to a bailout. The President calls the GOP argument a "cynical and deceptive assertion." CBS' Cordes did the correct thing and tried to adjudicate between the two claims. "Who is right?" she inquired of the Brookings Institution's Douglas Elliott. Elliott--mostly--sided with Obama: "The bill would make bailouts significantly less likely but there is no way to end completely the possibility."
NBC's Guthrie did not inquire, just leaving the He-Said-She-Said lying there, uninformatively.
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