It’s tough, however, to assign responsibility to regulators who routinely fend off or stymie anyone attempting to scrutinize how the cops on the beat functioned in the years preceding the financial meltdown. So everyday Americans need to kick and scream if they want some light shed on this critical epoch in our financial history.

To bring accountability to regulatory performance, Mr. Kane suggests that financial supervisors take an oath of office in which they agree to perform four duties. First is the duty of vision, under which they would promise to adapt their surveillance practices to respond to the creative ways financial institutions hide their dubious practices. Regulators must also promise to take prompt corrective action, and to perform their work efficiently. Finally, there is what Mr. Kane calls the duty of “conscientious representation,” whereby regulators swear to put the interests of the community ahead of their own.

This last promise gets to the heart of a continued erosion of trust in our system, Mr. Kane argues. “If real world supervisors were perfectly virtuous, they would make themselves politically and financially accountable for the ways in which they exercise their discretion,” he writes. “Perfectly virtuous supervisors would fearlessly bond themselves to disclose enough information about their decision making to allow the community or interested outsiders to determine whether and how badly they neglect, abuse, or mishandle their responsibilities.”

Instead, our regulators refuse to produce complete documentation and accounts of the actions they took during the crisis. And keeping taxpayers in the dark isn’t exemplary ethical behavior. Rather, it is characteristic of what Mr. Kane calls an elitist regulator, one who uses crises to cover up mistakes and expand his or her jurisdiction.

“According to this standard,” Mr. Kane writes, “Fed efforts to use the crisis as a platform for self-congratulation and for securing enlarged systemic-risk authority sidetracks, rather than promotes, effective reform.”

To ensure that regulators live up to the promises they make, Mr. Kane suggests that inspectors general at each agency be charged with regularly auditing the performance of financial overseers. A crucial component of those reviews would be exploring attempts by regulated entities to influence the officials who oversee them. That’s because in financial crises, Mr. Kane explained, crippled institutions pressure the government to rescue them and force other parties (usually the taxpayers) to share their pain.

“We’ve got a very comfortable equilibrium here where Wall Street praises the authorities and the authorities give Wall Street more or less what it wants and they hope that the public really doesn’t understand the depth of the cynicism involved,” Mr. Kane said in an interview. “You keep reading about how wonderful it is that we didn’t have a Great Depression. Well, if they can sell that point of view, then nothing will change.”