Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.

On the surface, there was no area of the financial industry the plan didn’t touch. “I was impressed by the real estate it covered,” said Daniel Alpert, the managing partner of Westwood Capital. The president’s proposal addresses derivatives, mortgages, capital, and even, in the wake of the American International Group fiasco, insurance companies. Among other things, it would give new regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve, create a new agency to help protect consumers of financial products, and make derivative-trading more transparent. It would give the government the power to take over large bank holding companies or troubled investment banks  powers it doesn’t have now  and would force banks to hold onto some of the mortgage-backed securities they create and sell to investors.

But it’s what the plan doesn’t do that is most notable.

Take, for instance, the handful of banks that are “too big to fail” and which, in some cases, the government has had to spend tens of billions of dollars propping up. In a recent speech in China, the former Federal Reserve chairman  and current Obama adviser  Paul Volcker called on the government to limit the functions of any financial institution, like the big banks, that will always be reliant on the taxpayer should they get into trouble. Why, for instance, should they be allowed to trade for their own account  reaping huge profits and bonuses if they succeed  if the government has to bail them out if they make big mistakes, Mr. Volcker asked.

Many experts, even at the Federal Reserve, think that the country should not allow banks to become too big to fail. Some of them suggest specific economic disincentives to prevent growing too big and requirements that would break them up before reaching that point.

Yet the Obama plan accepts the notion of “too big to fail”  in the plan those institutions are labeled “Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies”  and proposes to regulate them more “robustly.” The idea of creating either market incentives or regulation that would effectively make banking safe and boring  and push risk-taking to institutions that are not too big to fail  isn’t even broached.