There's faint hope that a bipartisan group can force banks that accept federally insured deposits to focus on traditional lending and would bar them from engaging in risky securities trading.

Nice to have friends.  Of course, any offense of yours will follow you everywhere.

On May 20 of this year, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both entered a guilty plea on one felony count of conspiring to rig foreign currency exchange trades, the largest market on the globe.

Five days earlier, on May 15, HUD slipped a notice into the Federal Register, seeking to alter its standard loan-level certification form, known as HUD-92900-A. This form must be filled out for lenders to receive FHA insurance, which reimburses them if the homeowner falls into foreclosure.

On the current HUD-92900-A form, lenders must certify that their firm and its principals "have not, within a three-year period ... been convicted of or had a civil judgment rendered against them" for a variety of crimes, including "commission of fraud ... violation of Federal or State antitrust statutes or commission of embezzlement, theft, forgery, bribery, falsification or destruction of records, making false statements or receiving stolen property."

JPMorgan and Citi's guilty plea would fall under the antitrust statute, and according to Brown, Warren and Waters' reading of the certification, that would make them ineligible to obtain FHA insurance on their loans.

On the updated form, this language has been excised. The notice in the Federal Register did not even mention the removal, making it impossible to discover without comparing the old form and the proposed form side by side.