There's some additional recent work out there that's worth citing in connection with Karen's post on Tuesday.

In particular, I would point readers to the piece posted Monday on voxeu.org by Enrico Perotti, a finance professor at the Amsterdam Business School. Essentially, Perotti's piece explains why Kotlikoff's prescription is necessary. As it did the US Congress, the banking industry has fought off international attempts to get the so-called Basel Committee to force the industry to de-leverage its business model. And Kotlikoff's idea does exactly that, simply because mutual funds are financed entirely by equity.

While many critics claim the financial regulation bill that emerged from Congressional negotiations on Friday will do next to nothing to reduce the chances of another banking crisis, there are some limits on risk taking that could do just that.

The one that strikes me as the toughest and most critical is the so-called Lincoln amendment, which would require banks to separately capitalize their trading in credit default swaps, which were central to the recent crisis.

The members of Congress in charge of creating a financial reform bill recently decided to remove majority voting for electing board members from the legislation and to include only a diluted version of proxy access for nominating board candidates, as my colleague Stephen Taub just discussed .

That latest cop-out underscores an increasingly obvious truth about this legislation: It's not going to change the financial system significantly nor will it do much to prevent another major crisis.

I'm as a big a fan of Paul Volcker as the next guy but am struggling to understand why he objects to the so-called Lincoln amendment. All it would do at the end of the day is force banks to separately capitalize their derivatives operations, as Simon Johnson explains today.

I can understand why the bank lobby is against the idea. More capital would make their operations less profitable. But that's also the only way to make them less risky as well.

Despite the prospective "success" of financial reform legislation, my sense is that very little will change on Wall Street as the bills passed by the House and Senate are likely to emerge from conference committee. And that will prevent any economic recovery that isn't just another asset bubble in disguise.

The fundamental problem, or at least one such obstacle, as I see it, is that reform as currently likely will do little or nothing to restructure the banking industry, instead leaving it to regulators to impose new rules with which to limit risk.

I see that Ben Bernanke, Sheila Bair and even Paul Volcker are trying to convince Congress not to require big banks to spin off their derivatives operations, or make other fundamental changes besides getting out of proprietary trading, the so-called Volcker rule.

Bernanke, in particular, is defending the rest of the current set-up and insisting, in effect, that regulators can take care of all of the rest of the problems that banks that are too big to fail represent, with just a few technical changes involving leverage and capital reserves and the like.

Better late than never, I suppose. But Big Bob Rubin has apparently had a change of heart as to the virtues of financial deregulation.

Appearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today with former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince in his capacity as former vice chairman of the bailed out bank, Rubin expressed much different sentiments about the need to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail and derivatives from adding untold amounts of undetectable leverage to the financial system than he did when he was President Clinton's deregulator in chief.

With Congress expected to debate financial regulatory reform until the cows come home, lots of commentators are weighing in on what it must do to inhibit, if not prevent, an even worse financial meltdown. (And no, we aren't out of the woods, not by a long shot.)

Our own Marine Cole ventured into these waters last week with a piece on to what degree legislation as currently formulated would require bank regulators to toughen their capital reserve requirements. But there's a lot more to say about that, too much.

A piece today by derivatives expert Satyajit Das helps put to rest some if not all of the doubts expressed about the Volcker Rule's potential efficacy.

Much of the criticism by those who say it doesn't go far enough focuses argues  that forcing banks that get deposit insurance to shed their proprietary trading operations would not necessarily eliminate systemic risk, since taxpayers could not afford to see huge trading operations bring down the markets even if their deposits were still protected. Mister Market is just too important for that.

Can someone please explain what Timothy Geithner really thinks about Wall Street? Today we get completely mixed messages from the Treasury about financial reform.

One the one hand, The New York Post and Bloomberg reported that the Treasury has succeeded in getting the White House to drop the so-called Volcker Rule, the proposal that is named after the administration's chief proponent, Obama advisor and former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, and would force banks that get deposit insurance to shed their proprietary trading operations and other speculative businesses.