A year ago, when opposition from the asset-management industrykilled her plan to make money-market mutual funds safer, U.S.Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Mary Schapirolooked to Timothy Geithner, then the Treasury Secretary, to tackle“one of the pieces of unfinished business from the financialcrisis.”

It remains unfinished.

As Schapiro and Geithner prepared to leave government toward theend of 2012, the effort started anew to make the $2.6 trillionmoney-fund industry less likely to disrupt global financialmarkets. Norm Champ, a Harvard University-trained lawyer and theSEC's top regulator of mutual funds, canvassed the remaining fourcommissioners, seeking to find common ground on which new rulescould be built after Schapiro failed to corral enough votes to pushher plan forward.