I’ve been telling you about the critical concessions in the last days of the FinReg conference committee. Let’s step back a second. This bill won’t end too big to fail. It won’t protect the country to enough of a degree in the event of the next crisis. But it could do some positive things that would head in that direction. It could balance the relationship between the country and the oligopoly of giant, unaccountable banks. It could give consumers a fighting chance to protect themselves from getting screwed repeatedly. And as a financial reform bill, it’s a pretty solid anti-predatory lending bill. Heck, I’d cleave those pieces off, support it as a standalone, and hail a good progressive victory.

In a statement, Lincoln’s spokeswoman said she wanted to make sure “no Arkansas bank—no matter its owner—is punished”. Why does raising capital requirements constitute punishment? Aren’t Arkansas families punished when leverage goes up and risk enters the system and banks fail, rippling through the economy and causing the kind of deep recession we saw in the 2008 period? Lincoln’s claim that she just wants to protect local banks that didn’t destroy the economy – ridiculous on its face, because the market for riskier securities could easily flow down to banks with looser regulatory requirements – doesn’t match her actions.

Yesterday was a singularly unimpressive day at the Wall Street reform conference committee, with concessions and industry giveaways galore.

All four key areas identified by Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute are under attack from the finance lobby. All four are crucial to get us closer to a safe and working banking system. Negotiations continue throughout the weekend.

Though the New York Times’ Joe Nocera may be off on point on changes to credit rating agencies, the overall thrust of his article is quite correct. Nocera, like many reformers, is a structuralist, believing that the very structure of Wall Street is at issue, not the way it gets regulated. And therefore, he would naturally look at what passed the Senate and say that it comes up far short.

It’s clear who has driven the process of more discretion for the regulators, less hard constraints on the banks and the elimination of anything that would actually alter the way Wall Street does business — the White House and the Treasury Department.

Barney Frank announced his conferees for the Wall Street reform bill Wednesday, and he made the important point that the focus on the specific names is a little misplaced. The views of the leadership, and the White House, and what can garner the requisite votes, will factor into the ultimate decisions as much as the specific conferees involved. Frank called his conferees “the agents of collective decision-making than autonomous deciders.”

With both houses of Congress now having passed a Wall Street reform bill, the action now moves to the conference committee. There, House and Senate negotiators will work to finalize a bill with new regulations for the financial services industry, and report back for a final Congressional vote. Here’s a run-down of items in contention.

There’s word that the Merkley-Levin amendment — which would ban banks and bank holding companies from engaging in high-risk proprietary trading, force additional capital requirements on any nonbank financial institution which engages in such speculative trading, and prohibits any financial firm from packaging asset-backed securities to their clients and then take the opposite side of the deal — may also need 60 votes to pass.

Well, this is EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE WHO FAVOR REGULATING BANK SIZE HAVE BEEN SAYING. The non-financial bloggers in the wonkosphere seem to be constructing the mother of all straw men, arguing that those who want to break up the banks think that alone can solve the systemic problems at the root of the financial sector. Nobody I’ve read has been saying that. They all favor a both/and approach, including things like, well, derivative reform, and stronger regulations on shadow banking, and ending the accounting tricks, and even leverage and capital requirements. I don’t see the two sides in this debate at all in disagreement, other than what reforms they choose to emphasize. But there’s sure a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpreting at work. Maybe it’s because those making these arguments know them to be theoretical, as the likely outcome will probably be pathetic on all counts, with Democrats happier to get a “win” than anything fundamentally shaking up the system. Maybe everyone’s staking out higher ground.