[T]he Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value. . . .

Many experts, even at the Federal Reserve, think that the country should not allow banks to become too big to fail. Some of them suggest specific economic disincentives to prevent growing too big and requirements that would break them up before reaching that point.

Yet the Obama plan accepts the notion of “too big to fail” — in the plan those institutions are labeled “Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies” — and proposes to regulate them more “robustly.” The idea of creating either market incentives or regulation that would effectively make banking safe and boring — and push risk-taking to institutions that are not too big to fail — isn’t even broached.

Or take . . . the so-called bespoke derivatives — customized, one-of-a-kind products that generated enormous profits for institutions like A.I.G. that created them, and, in the end, generated enormous damage to the financial system. For these derivatives, the Treasury Department merely wants to set up a clearinghouse so that their price and trading activity can be more readily seen. But it doesn’t attempt to diminish the use of these bespoke derivatives.

. . . Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul. The new bank supervisor, for instance, is really nothing more than two smaller agencies combined into one. The plans calls for new regulations aimed at the ratings agencies, but offers nothing that would suggest radical revamping.

The plan places enormous trust in the judgment of the Federal Reserve — trust that critics say has not really been borne out by its actions during the Internet and housing bubbles. Firms will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but once the financial crisis is over, it will, in all likelihood, be back to business as usual. . . .

The bottom line here, it seems to me, is that Obama is under tremendous pressure from Wall Street interests not to come down too hard on them. Why? The fact that key Wall Street figures were prominent in his political campaign and among his top fundraisers, and that financial interests generated a huge share of his total campaign war chest, is not receiving adequate attention. Nor is the precise process that resulted in his choosing the establishment figures Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, rather than selecting from the abundant pool of economists with bolder visions and greater independence from the financial powers-that-be. To what extent do the sources of the problem have the president’s ear? I can’t think of a more important journalistic mission than finding out.

When the results of the government’s financial stress tests were announced last week, Citigroup seemed to have dodged a bullet. The bank, long thought to be in the worst shape among the nation’s largest lenders, was said to need just $5.5 billion in capital in order to return to health. No small sum, to be sure. But amazingly, what Citi was required to raise was less than half the $13.7 billion that competitor Wells Fargo was told to come up with. And far less than the nearly $34 billion that regulators said Bank of America needed to bolster its capital by in the next six months.

Dig a little deeper, though, and Citi’s stress-test results look more like an F than the B+ the bank seemed to get. Among the 19 banks the government probed, Citi was found to have the lowest common capital ratio, which the government said was a key measure to protect against insolvency. What’s more, Citi also got credit for a capital conversion it has yet to complete. Strip that out, and the amount of capital Citi needs balloons to nearly $63 billion, more than any of the other banks tested.

Such fudging of the numbers shouldn’t surprise. After the Federal Reserve’s commitment of up to $220 billion, Treasury’s $50 billion, and the FDIC’s $10 billion, is a $58 billion difference in the numbers that big of a deal, especially between such close friends as Geithner and Citigroup?