At what was surely a suave gathering of banking officials in Atlanta on June 7, this exchange was noted between Morgan Stanley’s Jaime Dimon and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke. The answer should scare you.

Mr. Dimon: Y’know, I have this, totally, I completely agree that we had a crisis and that it entailed doing a lot of things to fix and reduce risk. I have this great fear that someone’s going to write a book in 10 or 20 years, and the book is going to talk about all the things that we did in the middle of a crisis that actually slowed down recovery…

Now we’re told there could be even higher capital requirements, so-called SIFI and G-SIFI charges [global systemically important financial institutions ], etc., and we know there are 300 rules coming. Has anyone bothered to study the cumulative effect of all these things, and do you have a fear like I do that when we will look back and look at them all, that they will be the reason it took so long that our banks, our credit and our businesses—most importantly, job creation isn’t going again. is this holding us back? 

Mr. Bernanke: This is certainly the most comprehensive reform since the 1930s and we’re trying to execute it and trying to address all of the problems, and you didn’t mention three or four others I could think of. So, yes. it was a big problem. It has a huge impact… So there are many, many things to fix. We’re working on them and making, I hope, a lot of progress.

Has anybody done a comprehensive analysis of the impact on credit? i can’t pretend that anybody really has. You know, it’s just too complicated. We don’t really have the quantitative tools to do that…

We are trying to develop rules that make sense, that are consistent with good practice, but which do not unnecessarily impose costs, or unnecessarily constrict credit.