If crisis is change's catalyst, recovery is its inhibitor. As preparations for the G20 summit get under way, finance ministers meeting in London deserve credit for averting economic apocalypse. In reforming financial regulation, however, their efforts are thus far lacking. The debate has been hijacked by an understandably populist, but often tangential, focus on bankers' pay. Meanwhile, reforming zeal is in danger of being squandered, as broad-brush visions gloss over trickier questions of implementation and efficacy.

The ability to deal with failing institutions is crucial, and the idea of “living wills” for banks has merit. But the welcome simplification of banks that these would require is a fight the regulators may not be up to. Everyone agrees, meanwhile, that banks should have more capital. So introduce market-structures that involve, say, forced conversion of debt to equity, which would help lessen the implicit state guarantees now swaddling the sector and limit the potential for regulatory forbearance. It is also time to come up with a clear view of leverage that encompasses, for example, risk buried within instruments or squirrelled away off-balance sheet.

When it comes to oversight of institutions and the system itself, who does it is less important than what they do. After all, both the UK's single body and the US's cast of many failed utterly, proving that bureaucratic stasis is an inter- and intra-agency problem. The Securities and Exchange Commission's abject failure to act upon warnings about Bernard Madoff's fraud is an extreme example of a common phenomenon.