Messrs Dodd and Frank now seem set to join Glass and Steagall, Gramm, Leach and Bliley, and Sarbanes and Oxley in the pantheon of Congressional greats who have influenced the Wall Street ecosystem. Unless the death of Senator Robert Byrd disrupts the arithmetic, their legislation should reach the statute book within days.

There may be someone who has read all 2,300 pages of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's financial reform bill, though if so it is probably only a lawyer, which doesn't count. But the broad lines of the legislation are clear. Derivatives trading will be brought on exchange, and the regulatory and capital treatment generally tightened up, investment banks will have the ghost of Paul Volcker haunting their trading floors, and there will be new and tough oversight of retail markets by a consumer protection body. Most of this is useful, as far as it goes. But how well do the provisions of the bill respond to the regulatory failings in the US that the crisis revealed?

There are, of course, many analyses of the origins of the crisis, some more plausible than others. Poor regulation was by no means the only factor at play. But one useful source on the regulatory dimension is the self- assessment produced by the US Treasury in March 2008.