Elizabeth Warren

Back in 2007, a relatively unknown Harvard Law professor named Elizabeth Warren warned that "for a growing number of families who are steered into...risky subprime mortgages...trust in a creditor turns out to be costly." In the months after the housing crash, Warren became a very public beacon of reason -- it's no wonder she is now considered the lead candidate to head the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, created by the financial bill he signed last week. Republican lawmakers and many mortgage bankers are leery of what they perceive to be Warren's anti-bank rhetoric, but many Democratic leaders and consumer advocates praise her "enormous credibility," as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put it.

Late on your mortgage? Did you know you might be able to negotiate a 20 percent reduction in what you owe? Josh Rosner, a financial analyst specializing in mortgage-backed securities, says that lenders know that if a home goes into foreclosure, the lender will lose 60 percent or more. So what's stopping them? The banks that hold the second mortgages. Those banks routinely block such requests because debt reduction for a borrower would spell instant losses for them. And Treasury is letting them get away with it.

It's enough to make most people furious, and a recent New York summit that brought together the rock stars of power-to-the-people financial reform-everyone from TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and investor George Soros to Rosner, ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan-one message came through loud and clear: The American people are mad as hell about a financial system that puts them last, and aren't going to take it anymore.