Quick Picks: More Midnight Regs and Faulting the Fed

Quick Picks focuses on a select few of the day’s stories from “Breaking on the Web.”

• Bush’s midnight regulations are rearing their ugly head again: Bloomberg News reports that “with no public notice or attention,” the former administration enacted a change last fall that could hamper lawsuits against the $144 billion nursing-home industry. The rule makes it harder to obtain inspection reports, which could allow “bad practices to be kept in secret by nursing homes and inspectors,” a National Senior Citizens Law Center attorney told Bloomberg.
• Susan Schmidt Bies, one of the seven Federal Reserve governors from 2001 to 2007, tells the Greenville News that she feels “accountable” for the financial crisis, but notes she didn’t have enough information at the time to do anything differently. She faults the Fed for not raising interest rates faster, and also points to pressure from Congress: “[I]f you’ve got people in Congress who really feel everybody ought to get a mortgage, period, then tightening those standards, they really feel you’re not allowing people to own a home.”

Check out more of our roundup of the best investigative stories around the Web.

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