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OVERSIGHT — A 10-member council of regulators led by the Treasury secretary would monitor threats to the financial system. It would decide which companies were so big or interconnected that their failures could upend the financial system. Those companies would be subject to tougher regulation. If such a company teetered, the government could liquidate it. The costs of taking such a company down would be borne by its industry peers.

Looking back, Mr. Bennett of Utah said he had no regrets. “Knowing what I know now, absolutely I would vote for it again, even if I knew it was going to end my political career,” he said.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

The fate and scope of financial reform is now left to the Senate and House conference committee, which is putting together the final bill. It is an unsettling time as the struggle over derivatives reform, the Volcker Rule and untold nuances and seemingly minor provisions are left to jockeying among elected representatives. Yet, while there are many good things in the bill that should form the core of any financial reform and subsequent acts by Congress, there is one area — perhaps the key one — that this bill fails to address.

In the first place, there is nothing even remotely radical about anything in these bills. Nobody is suggesting setting up a new Securities and Exchange Commission, which reshaped Wall Street regulation when it was formed in 1934. Nobody is talking about breaking up banks the way they did in the 1930s with the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act. Nobody is even talking about a wholesale revamping of a regulatory system that so clearly failed in this crisis. “They are trying to attack the symptoms, instead of the basic issues,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director of the Institutional Risk Analyst. There is something oh-so-reasonable about these bills, as if Congress was worried that they might do something that would — heaven forbid! — upset the banking industry.

To this point, we have succeeded in keeping the public focused on the single issue that will have very little effect on how we do business: the quest to prevent taxpayer money from ever again being used to (as they put it) “bail out Wall Street.”

The third point likely to be underplayed is that this unusual dynamic owes nothing to the integrity of the senators and everything to the anger of the American public. Dodd and Lincoln, both facing wrathful voters and long odds on reelection, simply were trying to survive (Dodd finally gave up and decided to retire — sorry, “depart in triumph’’).

It remains to be seen whether that approach will curb the excesses of an industry adept at navigating through regulation in the pursuit of profit. Already, some Wall Street executives are expressing relief, convinced that the bill won’t fundamentally alter the way they operate.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.

“Regulators working right now will be tough,” Professor Skeel said. “But we know from history that as soon as this legislative moment passes, the ball is going to shift back into Wall Street’s court. As soon as the crisis passes, what inevitably happens is that the people that are paying the most attention are the banks.”