Key players in reshaping U.S. financial regulation

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The cast of characters who will tackle the overhaul of America's financial regulation system ranges from the nation's first black president to the Securities and Exchange Commission's first female chair.

* Barack Obama, president-elect

The new U.S. president, taking office on January 20, wants to rein in the financial services sector after a free-wheeling period blamed by some for the capital crisis behind the recession. Many Democrats in Congress agree with Obama.

A reshuffle seems likely for the alphabet soup of agencies overseeing markets and banking. Decades of deregulation may be slammed into reverse by Obama, a community organizer and civil rights lawyer before entering the Senate in 2005.

"A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get," he said in a New York speech in March.

Obama has suggested that in exchange for getting support from the U.S. government, financial institutions should be made subject to tougher capital and liquidity requirements.

* Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman

The soft-spoken, 55 year old studied the Great Depression in graduate school, preparing him for today's crisis.

Unlike his 1930s predecessors, Bernanke is turning on the money taps to flood the system with liquidity, while slashing interest rates to spur the economy and fight deflation.

Before taking the reins at the Fed in February 2006, he briefly headed President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Before that, he had three years of service on the Fed Board, adding practical policy experience to his earlier theoretical work as an academic at Princeton University.

A sober-sided "gray man" in appearance, Bernanke is plain-spoken in contrast to predecessor Alan Greenspan, whose obscure policy pronouncements often left listeners perplexed.

Bernanke has dazzled markets with inventive tactics for adding liquidity through new lending "facilities" that make his pronouncements as closely watched as Greenspan's ever were.

* Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary

The bald, bespectacled former Goldman Sachs boss seemed briefly to be running Washington in September and October, as if he had elbowed aside lame-duck President George W. Bush.

Paulson, 62, seized control of struggling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and decided their fate. In typically forceful fashion, he sold Congress on a $700 billion bailout program meant to stabilize the global financial system.

That has not exactly gone according to plan. Indeed, it has changed directions with dizzying speed, making Paulson look like he was making policy on the fly. One thing is certain -- his efforts have changed U.S. conceptions of the appropriate role of government in the economy and left an imprint that will long be felt by Obama and congressional Democrats.