Perhaps trying to burnish his legacy on financial reform, President Obama has recently trumpeted his signature steps to transform Wall Street in the years since the financial crisis that confronted him as he began his term eight years ago.

But there are reasons to doubt that his efforts will have the profound effect he hopes they will.

After a March 7 meeting at the White House with the top Wall Street regulators, including Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Obama praised the Dodd-Frank reform law, the Volcker Rule that seeks to prevent proprietary trading and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is intended to make the world as safe from bad mortgages as it is from bad toasters.

“I want to emphasize this because it is popular in the media, in political discourse — both on the left and the right — to…

Senior House Financial Services Committee member, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) told a conference of bankers Wednesday morning that they needed to “find a way to neuter” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to Politico. Luetkemeyer was at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington when he made the remark, also calling Warren “the Darth Vader of the financial services world.”

According to Allied Progress, Luetkemeyer is an old friend to the banking and predatory lending industry, receiving more than $1 million in campaign donations from the industry.

He’s also scored more than $63,000 from predatory payday lenders which Senator Warren sought to put out of business with a bill she proposed in 2014 that would replace them with the United States Post Office. Nearly one in ten service members end up taking out loans from these sketchy lenders with high interest rates and end up crushed under the weight of…

Now that’s a start…

(Reuters) – Shareholders of J.P.Morgan Chase & Co (>> JPMorgan Chase & Co.) and Citigroup Inc (>> Citigroup Inc) will get to vote on whether the two banks should break up into smaller pieces, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The question will be included in their proxy filings, and voted on at a shareholder meeting later this year, the Journal reported.

The vote was requested by Bartlett Naylor, a shareholder in both Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, according to the Journal.

J.P.Morgan declined to comment, while Citi was not immediately available for comment.

The breakup of large banks into smaller ones has been an ongoing issue in the U.S. campaign trail.

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Jeoffrey Jenkins, a former employee of Wells Fargo Bank, and Vaughn Chambers, a former employee of SunTrust Bank, were sentenced for their roles in a two-year long tax refund fraud scheme that generated hundreds of false tax returns and sought more than $2.8 million in fraudulent tax refunds.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Jenkins and Chambers, both bank employees, stole personally identifying information from bank customers and used that information to open bank accounts to receive the fraudulent tax refunds.

Read on.