I'm not going to pretend to understand all of the technical details involved in the current debate over financial reform. I do understand two things rather well though: that allowing investment schemes to take massive gambles while shifting the risk of failure to third parties is insane and that continuing to allow strictly private institutions to have enough pull on the entire economy to wreck it should they fail is suicidal.

This is the perfect case for what I've been saying for years: we are no longer living in a simple world. The number and scale of connections between the various economic nodes has reached such a scale of interdependency that, beyond a certain stage, no major business concern is truly "private".