The new financial regulatory reform

Kevin Drum is unhappy.  Paul Krugman is critical.  My mental model of Simon Johnson is even more critical.  Need I cite Yves Smith?  Felix Salmon is confused.

Is there anything to say, other than rehashing old debates about regulation and blame?

As the NYT notes:

A key element in the plan will be creating an independent Consumer
Financial Protection Agency to write and enforce rules on fair lending
and other matters.

Maybe that's where one chance to get tough lies.  We are creating an agency which will have plenty of incentive to limit risk by installing plain vanilla products, and yet it will have little stake in preserving economic growth. 

It is possible that the real action is in the future flow of financial innovation rather than how we treat the stock of extant financial innovation (recall Arnold Kling's chess game analogy).  I suspect the Obama plan is tougher on the former than on the latter.

I would say we still don't know what is actually going to be done.

Addendum: Here are more details, I believe they support the last sentence of this post.  Matt Yglesias offers good comments.