Simon Johnson has a good analysis of the administration’s so-called regulatory reform:

Writing in the New York Times today, Joe Nocera sums up, “If Mr. Obama hopes to create a regulatory environment that stands for another six decades, he is going to have to do what Roosevelt did once upon a time. He is going to have make some bankers mad.”

Good point – but Nocera is thinking about the wrong Roosevelt (FDR).  In order to get to the point where you can reform like FDR, you first have to break the political power of the big banks, and that requires substantially reducing their economic power - the moment calls more for Teddy Roosevelt-type trustbusting, and it appears that is exactly what we will not get.

Interstate banking should have never been allowed.  The issue is an old one, but still real.  If that had been stopped, it would have prevented concentration in too big to fail banks. The best reform is to go back to what had been proven to work over about 60 years.  We need to break those big banks up and restrict their territories, geographically and with respect to business lines. But as Dr. Johnson says:

The reform process appears to be have been captured at an early stage – by design the lobbyists were let into the executive branch’s working, so we don’t even get to have a transparent debate or to hear specious arguments about why we really need big banks.