This paper argues that resolving the global crisis of financial systems depends on recognizing and responding to the considerable, multi-dimensional power accumulated by the very financial firms whose dysfunctionality helped create that crisis in the first place. The existing rhetoric of financial regulation which focuses attention on problems of mechanism design, fails to take into account the presence and implications of systemic power in the system. But unless the debate over financial regulation is broadened, decades of sub-par growth and excessive financial exploitation lie ahead.

May 18, 2010.