Obama’s impotent assault on Wall Street.

On January 21, in an abrupt change of policy, President Obama announced his intention to take on the big bankers who have brought us so much trouble. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he said with a clenched jaw at a press conference.

The president’s conviction seemed genuine in no small part because at his back, figuratively and literally, the president had Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman and economic éminence grise. Arguably the most respected man in all of finance--and a lion held at bay (or in a far away office) over the past year by the president’s closest advisers--Volcker has devised two simple rules to defang our financial system. First, no bank would be allowed to engage in “proprietary trading,” in which it takes risks using its own capital in ways that are completely separate from services provided to clients. Second, there would be a cap on the size of our largest banks, relative to the size of total liabilities in the banking system. “Too big to fail” would finally become “too big to exist.”

After a long struggle, it would seem the president has become convinced that our financial sector has grown dangerous and needs to be reined in. It has long been clear that the framework in which bank executives are rewarded for taking huge risks during boom times, and taxpayers are punished for such excesses during bad times, is not sustainable. And now, the hubris of top bankers--spurning audiences with the president and paying themselves huge bonuses, despite White House protests--has finally caught up with them. Even Wall Street cannot moon the giant and get away with it. The course of financial-sector reform is corrected.

Yet, for all of Volcker’s good analysis, his presence does not necessarily change anything. To determine if the Obama administration is serious about solving the underlying crisis in finance, we need to get past Volcker’s totemic visage and examine the substance of his rules. Burrowing a bit deeper, unfortunately, we find out how little would actually change.

The president is absolutely correct that our priority should be to limit the size of our largest banks and to reduce substantially the risks that can be taken by any financial entity that is backed, implicitly or explicitly, by the federal government. As a result of the crisis and various government rescue efforts, the largest six banks in our economy now have total assets in excess of 63 percent of GDP (based on the latest available data). This is a significant increase from even 2006, when the same banks’ assets were around 55 percent of GDP, and a complete transformation compared with the situation in the United States just 15 years ago, when the six largest banks had combined assets of only around 17 percent of GDP. If the status quo persists, we are set up for another round of the boom-bailout-bust cycle that the head of financial stability at the Bank of England now terms a “doom loop.”