Last month, for example, the federal regulators gutted a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that required securitizers to retain 5 percent of the the risk of the securities that they were creating—on the grounds that we really, really need the market for mortgage-backed securities to come back. This followed on earlier rules issued by the CFPB that, while certainly not all bad, gave lenders an expansive safe harbor from liability—because we really, really want banks to make mortgage loans. Then there are Fannie and Freddie, which are still doing that thing they do—using the federal government’s credit to subsidize home loans—because no one has the stomach to take on the real estate-financial complex.

It’s not just housing. Despite serious-sounding noises from the Federal Reserve, capital requirements for major financial institutions—those that could bring down the financial system—will at best increase from laughable to amusing. The opposition to higher capital requirements is based on the (fallacious) claim that more capital will reduce lending and therefore harm the economy.

In addition, federal regulators are woefully behind the curve when it comes to technology risk. In just the past year and a half, we’ve seen the BATS IPO debacle, the Facebook IPO fiasco, the Knight Capital implosion, the London Whale disaster (enabled by faulty risk modeling, done in part in Excel), and the Goldman options snafu. On a bigger scale, at a bad time of day, these shocks could seriously destabilize the financial system. In China, they ban people for life for this sort of thing. Here, where we claim to be so much better at protecting the integrity of the markets, not so much.

Then there is Larry Summers—who, apparently, continues to be President Obama’s first choice for chair of the Federal Reserve. Summers is certainly not devoid of qualifications. But if you actually understood the connection between financial deregulation in the 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008, Summers is just about the last person you would pick (falling somewhere between Greenspan and Rubin on the inappropriateness scale) for one of the two most important financial regulatory positions. Summers was the Clinton administration’s point person for financial deregulation and treasury secretary for both the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. There’s little reason to think his beliefs on the subject have changed.

If anything, it seems like Obama prefers Summers because of his “crisis-fighting” skills. That’s crazy. Not because Summers doesn’t have crisis-fighting skills, but because it’s a return to the bad old days of the Greenspan put: the idea that you don’t have to worry about downturns because the Fed chair can always bail everyone out. That this thoroughly discredited idea (eight million jobs, anyone?) is back—the Summers put instead of the Greenspan put—is as clear a sign as any of how little we learned.