Of course, greater capital requirements for banks amount to no binding constraint if there is continued enhanced freedom to identify as “capital” almost anything you want (debasing its “quality”), if there is no serious confrontation with the shadow banking sector and especially the plague of repo financing, and nothing whatsoever addresses the virtues of the possibility of separation of banking functions into different insulated institutions, such as the so-called Volcker Rule.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 539