Christine Arena 
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The International Monetary Fund is not known for random assaults on the financial establishment.
This makes the results of a new IMF study - A Fistfull of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis - all the more compelling. Large US banks that spend heavily on lobbying are more likely to engage in high-risk lending, and their shares perform less well. The UK's Guardian newspaper notes that finance sector lobbying outstripped all other sectors.
It is 8 days until the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission begin to take testimony from top bankers. Their lobbying activities should provide one of the core, and still current, seams of questioning.
So the joke goes like this: there's the World Bank - banker to the world's poor - standing on stage in a tux gleaming white...
Then the bank issues a report criticising global inertia in the face of impending climate catastrophe, and urging countries like India to find lower carbon methods of generating energy.
Then for a punchline our well dressed raconteur turns around, bends over and lets fly the filthiest, darkest cloud of coal soot that has ever made your eyes water and your water levels rise.
Hilarious.
The new constraint is part of a package of new rules being proposed in a discussion paper to be released by the FSA on Wednesday. The rules are specifically designed to rein in the risky lending practices that helped precipitate the global financial crisis.
According to The Guardian:
"Lenders, which during the boom offered 'extreme loans' of five or six times borrowers' salaries or more than 100 per cent of a property's value, could now be forced to impose strict limits on how much debt they allow homebuyers to take on."
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