James Surowiecki, in this week’s New Yorker, recalls the 2005 bankruptcy bill and how it privileged credit-card companies over both consumers and the economy. Credit-card companies were hugely profitable in the decade before 2004, but they wanted more, and Congress—with the help of some Democrats—was happy to oblige. For the economy as a whole, though, it created dead-weight economic loss and deterred entrepreneurial innovation. “In responding to an imaginary threat,” he writes, “we ended up making the economy less dynamic and less flexible. Now that hard times are here, we may find ourselves with a genuine bankruptcy crisis. But this will be one that Congress created.” His observation—that Congress has privileged the private wealth of corporations over not only consumers’ interests but also over sound economic policy—could not be more timely. Will the current crisis provoke huge reforms, as it did after the Depression, or nothing substantial, as it did after the Savings and Loan crisis?

In TIME this week, Justin Fox endorses Professor Warren’s proposal—taken up recently by Senator Clinton—for a Financial Product Safety Commission. Professor Warren’s argument is simple: You don’t have to be an engineer to buy a toaster, why should you have to be a banker or economist to get a credit card? Just like the Consumer Product Safety Commission makes sure that you can’t buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of blowing up in your face, the Financial Product Safety Commission would product consumers from mortgages that leaves them a one-in-five chance of losing their home. This may deter innovation, concedes Fox, but it’s time, he argues, to abandon “the priority among regulators and politicians . . . to try to manage risk but to by all means avoid thwarting innovation.” While it may sound un-American, he notes, the policy of the 1930s—1970s, the greatest period of economic expansion in American history, prioritized preventing crises and promoting stable growth over encouraging innovation at all costs. We are now seeing how “innovation”—without a regulatory framework—can mean creating products that do nothing but enrich financial institutions to the detriment both of consumers and of the American economy.