We still worry about leaving all of these critical details up to the banks — even with a promise from the Fed to be more vigilant. During the last several decades, banks have been given far too much room to write their own rules. The economic disaster around us is the result.

The Obama administration and Congress have vowed to regulate derivatives, the complex and often highly speculative financial instruments that were at the heart of the meltdown. Two House committees have approved legislation, but — after heavy lobbying from the banking industry and corporate America— both versions are weak and unlikely to prevent another fiasco.

Right now, many derivative deals are executed as private one-on-one contracts, outside the view of the public or regulators. This lack of transparency — about participants, prices and volumes — proved disastrous. In the bailout of American International Group, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars went to pay the world’s biggest banks for derivative bets gone spectacularly wrong.