Gary Gensler left Wall Street 13 years ago and doesn’t plan to return, which might explain why the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman is pushing harder than almost anyone else for sweeping regulation of the world’s largest banks.

Gensler wants big changes in the market for over-the-counter derivatives — high-stakes financial products traded dealer-to-dealer instead of through regulated exchanges. One type of these shadowy contracts led to American International Group Inc.’s $180 billion government bailout, or $600 per American citizen.

Given the AIG experience, you might think stringent new rules would be a sure thing. Not so.

The House passed a measure in December, and momentum is building for a Senate bill moving standardized OTC derivatives into clearinghouses that guarantee the trades in case of default.

The devil, however, is in the exemptions.

Those targeted in the reform effort have been chipping away at its scope. Financial firms want any new rules to cover the fewest possible products, while companies that use OTC derivatives worry costs would rise if the rules apply to them.

“Commissar Gensler,” as one Wall Street wag calls him, thinks exempting products and end-users could invite another financial tsunami down the line.

Gensler describes himself as “a washed-up old banker” who understands all too well how seemingly narrow loopholes can be expanded and exploited. As an official in the Clinton administration years ago, he helped exempt OTC energy contracts from regulatory safeguards such as position limits. Enron Corp. and others took advantage, and Gensler has since expressed regrets about failing to fight harder “for the American people.”

In light of a derivatives-related economic debacle in Greece, a few others are joining his once-lonely stand.

On Thursday, Gensler brings his tough-love message direct to the trade in an address before the Futures Industry Association here.

It’s been that kind of year for Daniel Ustian, chief executive of Navistar International Corp., whose strategy for negotiating the recession paid off, even as his plan to move three miles down the street triggered a public brawl.

Warrenville-based Navistar has made it through the worst downturn in memory without losing a dime, no easy feat in a business so cyclical its sales charts look like roller-coaster tracks.

The financial success hasn’t shielded it from angry locals denouncing its alleged affinity for “corporate welfare” and diesel exhaust. It’s not every day a company with roots dating to 1831 finds itself pitted against a neighborhood school for autistic children.

Navistar’s newly revised proposal for moving to the former Alcatel-Lucentsite off Interstate Highway 88 is heading for a showdown next month before the village board of trustees in Lisle, coinciding with some bold moves in the marketplace.

Ustian pushed hard into government contracting a couple of years ago, and his company now produces dozens of military vehicles.

“We had nothing before that,” he explained in an interview.

Government orders, especially for heavily armored vehicles known as MRAPs, kept Navistar in the black last year despite its huge legacy costs, burdensome debt and the worst commercial truck market since the 1950s.

Those military revenues have peaked after a couple of losing battles for additional contracts, and the company could post much lower results in that sector when it reports earnings on Monday.

But Ustian remains confident in his staying power, forecasting 2010 military sales of at least $2 billion, plus $500 million from related parts. “We’ll be closer to $3 billion,” he predicted.

As of mid-2008, unemployment benefits ran out after 26 weeks. Under two presidential administrations and a more-than-willing Congress, however, they kept growing and growing.First, they expanded by 20 weeks, then another 13, then 20 more and then 13 more. One additional week got added to the first 13 to make 14. Finally, another six got tacked on.

Add it up, and that’s 99 weeks of unemployment benefits available to Illinois residents who qualify. Other states have different rules, but many also run to 99 weeks at the maximum.

Given the rotten economy, it’s easy to imagine why politicians keep pumping quarters into the jukebox. It takes time to get a job, so the long duration of benefits is not a sign of deliberate malingering. But those government checks come with an unwanted side effect, especially for workers at the low end of the economic food chain.

They go a long way toward explaining why 40 percent of jobless Americans have been out of work for at least 27 weeks, the highest level since the government started keeping score in the 1940s.

“Those programs subsidize unemployment,” explained Robert Shimer, economics professor at the University of Chicago. “There could be good reasons to do it, but we should be clear on the cost. It has a pretty substantial impact.”

He reckons that the current level of benefits probably accounts for 1 to 1.5 percentage points of the 9.7 percent national unemployment rate.

Now the parent company is shrinking too.

Under a chief executive determined to remake its faltering business model, Playboy Enterprises Inc. has launched a fast-paced program to outsource much of its operations.

Since his appointment in June, new boss Scott Flanders has reached two major agreements that shift basic functions to outsiders with greater scale and expertise.

At least two more major partnership, joint-venture or licensing deals will follow in the coming year, making Playboy more profitable but, like its centerfold, “smaller and leaner,” Flanders said.

How much smaller?

Potentially small enough to hide behind a staple.

In a year, he said, the Chicago-based media conglomerate could cut its headcount of 573 employees by half as partners take over its existing operations and expand into new ventures.

Already, Flanders has outsourced production of the flagship magazine, and he’s counting on big results from his recent deal with IMG Licensing Worldwide to take over the company’s operations in Asia, he said. Playboy will be “open-minded” about expanding the IMG relationship into Europe as well, he added.

America had to do it, the thinking goes, to avoid a much worse fate.

How much worse? Try unemployment at 25 percent, not 10 percent. Try millions cast out of their homes, not hundreds of thousands. Try years of depression and pain for everyone, rather than recession and pain for many.

Few deliver this message with more conviction than Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief who did as much as anyone to engineer the bailouts while serving as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.

Touting his new memoir, “On the Brink,” at the University of Chicago this week, Paulson said that by propping up the financial system, the government bailouts averted catastrophe.

Without the government bailing out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, disaster would have followed, he said.

Without a bailout for insurer-turned-hedge-fund American International Group Inc.? Disaster.

Without a Troubled Asset Relief Program for the banks? Disaster.

In 2008, America stood only “hours away from an absolute collapse,” Paulson said. “If a bank fails, the ultimate victims are going to be the citizens. This was done for the American people.”

Yet the message never got through to the American people, Paulson said. Had he been a better public speaker, he said, more Americans would see the bailout his way: It was unpleasant but necessary, and maybe even heroic.

“So much of this is communication,” he said.

In other words, many Americans just don’t get it.

Funny, but the guy who shared the dais with him thinks Paulson doesn’t get it.

Miscommunication has nothing to do with public rage over the bailouts, said Raghuram Rajan, finance professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Main Street, Rajan said, sees all too clearly how Paulson and the rest went easy on their fellow bankers while preserving a status quo that had made them rich.

A giddy Wall Street analyst asked a technology executive on a conference call about an “exciting” new product that everybody “except for some folks on the moon” just couldn’t wait to hear about.

“I wouldn’t want to take away your joy of surprise,” the executive responded coyly.

Two days later, Apple Inc. unveiled its iPad tablet computer.

Hype is alive and well in technology today, and whether it’s an Android phone, a cloud-computing application or the heavily promoted linkup of Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, the hoopla seems to be everywhere.

A month or two ago, many Wall Street pros were assuming that tech stocks had run their course after a blistering 2009. Maybe not, some say today.

“I definitely think there’s more behind the hype here,” said Douglas Nardi, a managing director at Legg Mason Investment Counsel in Chicago. “There seems to be more of a supercycle as a result of the wireless innovation out there.”

Supercycles aside, many tech investors have come to believe that hype can be a valuable indicator, rising and falling in predictable waves.

A flurry of innovation leads to soaring expectations — in other words, hype — followed by a reality check. Eventually, practical developments prove their worth in the marketplace.

No matter what, it takes time. Even if the ideas work as advertised, the legal, regulatory and competitive environments rarely allow for progress at the pace investors would like.

The big run-up in stock prices last year owed as much to the relatively strong balance sheets and cash flow at tech companies as to any lofty breakthroughs. This year, bullish investors have a more ambitious outlook.

It has almost everything a driver could want in a small car, except for one important feature: It’s not big.

As the 2010 Chicago Auto Show winds down, Americans remain decidedly skeptical about the supposed virtues of small cars.

A backlash is brewing against government fuel-efficiency mandates that would require a slimming down of the nation’s fleet.

“People don’t want to buy them,” said Jim Hossack, a consultant at the AutoPacific research firm. “People, when they can, are driving the SUV and the pickup truck.”

In an AutoPacific survey of U.S. car owners last month, only 12 percent said they would select a small car to replace their current vehicle, down from 24 percent in the recession-wracked period a year earlier. That lack of interest came in spite of an 80-cent-per-gallon boost in the average price of gas from January 2009.

To an extent, the American love affair with gas guzzlers defies conventional wisdom.

Rising fuel costs and a weak economy argue for smaller cars. Environmental and national-security concerns argue for smaller cars. The president and Congress argue for smaller cars.

Yet America is built big.

Parking spots? Big. Interstates? Big. Distances? Big. “Americans themselves tend to be big,” Hossack noted.

Smaller cars also suffer from the perception that they’re not as safe.

As of this year, Social Security will be running in the red for the first time in a quarter-century.

The recession has pushed Americans by the hundreds of thousands onto benefit rolls. That, in turn, has sped up the day of reckoning when the baby boom generation burns through the money set aside for its retirement.

More than 2.7 million piled into the program last year as job prospects dwindled, up almost half a million from a busy year in 2008.

“This is the biggest jump in modern times,” a spokesman for the agency observed.

Now what?

Very likely, nothing.

After getting bruised in the fight over health care reform, the party in power will be staying far away from the proverbial “third rail” of politics. Maybe after the presidential election of 2012, meaningful reform could make it back on the agenda — maybe.

Meanwhile, the finances of this important program will keep deteriorating, raising the cost of an eventual fix.

“The longer you delay, the harder it will be,” said Ron Gebhardtsbauer, who heads the actuarial science program at Pennsylvania State University. “Congress fiddles while the budget burns.”

“This program affects hundreds of millions of Americans,” said Jason Fichtner, chief economist at the Social Security Administration. “They’re paying for a system that they expect to be there for them.”

Is Social Security going under? How could it be fixed? Should everybody worry?

This report addresses Social Security, explaining what you need to know and how the system may change in years to come. The good news: Social Security can afford to pay benefits for decades. The bad news: After that, without reform, it’s up for grabs.

How Social Security works

Practically every American has a friend or relative on Social Security. More than 52 million of the nation’s 309 million citizens received benefits from it last year. That’s one in every six.

The 75-year-old program is partly retirement plan and partly insurance. About two-thirds of annual payouts go to retirees. The other third goes to disabled Americans who cannot work and to the children or spouses of people who are disabled or die prematurely. The agency employs more than 65,000 workers to keep the checks coming.

None of the shiny new cars on display drove away with the accelerator stuck to the floor.

None of the brakes gave out.

None of the on-board computers needed a reboot.

As car lovers prepared to converge on McCormick Place for the show that runs through Feb. 21, workers using soft rags and feather dusters made sure that not a speck of dirt marred the Camrys and Corollas and third-generation Priuses.

As for the recent safety and quality issues dogging the world’s No. 1 car brand, Toyota would like to direct the customer’s attention to the redesigned 2011 Avalon, unveiled at the car fair Wednesday. It is, in the company’s words, “rich with premium touch points.”

Any other questions?

For Toyota, the show must go on, despite one of the most difficult marketing environments in its history.

Under scrutiny from customers, competitors and regulators alike, the Japanese automaker will be hard-pressed to maintain its share in a U.S. auto market rebounding slowly from the recent collapse.

The lingering effects of the recession stand to make practically any new vehicle a hard sell.

The latest estimates peg U.S. sales in 2010 at anywhere from 11 million to 12.5 million units. That’s an improvement from 2009, but still way off the 16 million-plus pace of pre-downturn years. As J.D. Power and Associates noted in a recent forecast, “North American production remains well below historic levels.”

Given that tepid outlook, competition will be intense.

While the perfectionists at the Toyota display were feather-dusting, Ford Motor Co. was showing off a pair of assembly-plant robots directly across the showroom aisle.