These bald facts seem to have been lost sight of as a plethora of new regulations hits the statute books in both the US and Europe, with a lot more on the way.
Many deal with hobby horses of particular legislators, such as the focus on swaps in the US at the bidding of senator Blanche Lincoln; other initiatives deal with areas of finance that are easy pickings for politicians, such as private equity and hedge funds, but which were not themselves instrumental in causing the crisis.
In the US, last month's Dodd-Frank Bill had little to say about the central question of bank capital and does not address the future status of the mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which helped fuel the housing bubble.
Doing anything that could put the prized goal of home ownership, for those on low earnings, further out of reach is anathema in both the US and the UK. But any government serious about preventing future crises must tackle this area. In the UK there is now tough talk about mortgages and affordability but a reluctance to really grapple with the problem in terms of robust loan-to-value or loan-to-income ratios.
A feature of the new regulatory regimes is the arrival of the system or macroprudential regulator to spot and rein in asset bubbles, as well as a bank resolution scheme to allow banks to fail without spreading panic. These are obviously improvements but no one can tell how they will work until the next stressed situation occurs.
The devil, of course, is going to be in the detail. Most banks will be holding more capital in future, whether they are told to or not, but the part of Basel III that has got them most exercised is the proposal on liquidity. The 'structural funding metric' could align the maturities of assets and liabilities so fully that the classic maturity-transformation role of banks would virtually disappear.
And as for the proposal by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in the US for banks to mark their loans to market (accounting for their value based on the current market price), this could make banking as we know it impossible.
Bankers still have some strong arguments to make if they are to avoid the worst perversities of the current regulatory packages.
