When the financial focus shifts to regulation...

Hopefully the bailout package that passed will stabilize the markets to the point that the world can start discussing the real issue: how to regulate the financial markets and Wall Street. We've noted that this discussion has started already, and the perceived failures of Sarbanes-Oxley have been invoked. But that should not deter people from trying to establish a set of rules that can eliminate the excesses and return of sanity to Wall Street. The issues are many. What to do with hedge funds? What to do abut leverage? How to regulates credit derivatives? These will not be easy to answer, and politics will bleed into the discussion. But it is a discussion that must take place. The New York Times weighs in with an insightful column that makes it clear how tricky all of this will be.