U.S. President Barack Obama will use this week`s anniversary of Lehman Brothers` collapse to pledge to drive through financial reforms in the face of opposition from banks, regulators and Congress, FT...

U.S. President Barack Obama will use this week`s anniversary of Lehman Brothers` collapse to pledge to drive through financial reforms in the face of opposition from banks, regulators and Congress, FT reported today. He will use a speech on Wall Street to say that his planned reforms, including powers to seize and wind down failing financial companies, must be made law to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis.   Speaking to the FT, Tim Geithner, U.S. Treasury secretary, said a lack of legal authority to support the banking system at the height of the crisis a year ago was a "tragic failure of the U.S. government". Mr Obama and Mr Geithner are attempting to use the specter of Lehman, which filed for bankruptcy protection on September 15 last year, to convince lawmakers to pass their plans. Mr Geithner said the reticence of Congress last year to give the administration of George W. Bush the power to invest taxpayers` money was a failure, though he noted it was "naturally . . . offensive to throw public money" at banks.   President  Barack Obama will head to Wall Street today to try to breathe new life into efforts to overhaul the financial regulatory system, an undertaking he has said is essential to halting the abuses and failures that led to the current crisis, the Washington Post reported. While the health-care debate has raged nationwide throughout the summer, financial reform virtually vanished from the public radar, even as an army of lobbyists worked on Capitol Hill to reshape the president`s agenda. In New York, Obama will try to retake the initiative, capping other recent efforts in which top government officials have emphasized improvements in the economy and made the case anew for rewriting the nation`s financial rulebook.   Joseph Stiglitz, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, Bloomberg reported. "In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger," Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday in Paris. "The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis."