Mr Brown

Mr Brown, By bargaining for his backing of the proposed overhaul of financial regulation, Senator Scott Brown appears to have won concessions for two major firms in his home state of Massachusetts.

The Republican senator extracted victories for the giant institutional investors Fidelity Investments and State Street, CNBC reported on Wednesday. (To be fair, one of the chief architects of the legislation is Representative Barney Frank, the powerful Democrat also from Massachusetts, who also favored some of the changes.)

According to the network, Fidelity benefited from a change advocated by Mr. Brown that defined "systematically significant" firms based on their activities, rather than on the size of their assets. With nearly $1.3 trillion in mutual fund assets under management, Fidelity would have been more likely to shoulder additional regulatory burdens under the old proposed definition.

As for State Street, the firm benefited by the introduction of a regulatory carve-out in the so-called Volcker Rule banning proprietary trading by banks. Under the version of legislation that Mr. Brown will support, banks will be allowed to invest up to 3 percent of a hedge fund or private equity fund, so long as the bank isn't investing more than 3 percent of its tier-one capital.