In fact, nonbank financial institutions do need to be regulated; they weren’t exactly the good guys during the housing bubble. But neither were the bankers, something they’ve conveniently forgotten.

Who do you think was creating all those subprime mortgages that the brokers and originators were peddling? The banks, that’s who. I’ve had mortgage brokers tell me how bank salespeople put enormous pressure on them to ratchet up their sales of, say, option A.R.M., no-doc mortgages mortgages the banks were offering, through the brokers  so they could make the loans and then bundle them to Wall Street for a hefty fee. Bankers were every bit as complicit in pushing mortgages on customers who lacked the means to pay them back.

Even now, banks are engaged in practices that are, at best, dubious, and at worst deceptive. How about, for instance, those rapacious debit card overdraft fees? My colleagues Ron Lieber and Andrew Martin have pointed out in recent articles that a decade ago, such fees barely existed; instead, the card was routinely rejected when a consumer tried to make a purchase with an empty bank account. Now, whether customers want overdraft protection or not, most banks cover the purchase and charge an absurdly high fee for the “privilege.”

No one can doubt that these fees hurt the very people who can least afford to pay them. (If you have college-age children, as I do, you know this firsthand.) But none of the regulators who are now supposed to be looking out for consumers were the least bit concerned. Only after the articles exposing these practices ran on the front page of The New York Times did several banks agree to abandon the fees for small overdrafts. But should it really require newspaper exposés to get banks to do the right thing?

Alas, without a consumer agency, that is pretty much what it takes. The real reason current regulators don’t pay more attention to consumer problems is not that they are evil (well, mostly they’re not), but that they have another mission that takes priority. They are charged with insuring the safety and soundness of the banking system. And safety and soundness means making sure that banks have enough capital  and are compensating for loan losses. When a bank decides to raise a customer’s credit card interest rate to 35 percent to make up for losses elsewhere in the credit card portfolio, that believe it or not, is a good thing from the perspective of safety and soundness. Even though it is a terrible thing for consumers.

Which is also why the bankers’ line about having their current regulators look out for consumers is so bogus. At the Federal Reserve, consumers will never come first; Alan Greenspan had the power to curb abusive subprime loans, but he just wasn’t interested. Nor is it any different over at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the nation’s other big bank regulator. Not long ago, John C. Dugan, the comptroller, gave a speech in which he said  channeling Mr. Yingling  that the banks had not been responsible for the financial crisis. Regulators who take their talking points from the American Bankers Association don’t exactly inspire confidence that they’re looking out for consumers.

A consumer protection agency, on the other hand, wouldn’t have that dual mission; its sole goal would be to try to keep bank  and nonbank  customers from being gouged, deceived or otherwise taken advantage of. Without question, it would occasionally come into conflict with the safety and soundness regulators. But that is why that oversight panel exists: to hash out such conflicts.