This is technocratic incrementalism, the idea that the best way to approach a very big problem—a complex, interconnected financial system anchored by large banks that are so poorly managed they are not even aware of the risks they are taking on—is with better disclosure here and stronger incentives there. That was the philosophy of Dodd-Frank, which, with the exception of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, largely amounted to giving existing regulators a handful of complicated new tools (living wills, hedge fund registration, the Office of Financial Research, derivatives clearinghouse regulation, and so on). Now Clinton is offering more of the same.

But what about the large, highly interconnected banks whose failure cost 8 million jobs and trillions of dollars of lost output? Here Clinton offers two promising-sounding ideas. One is to charge a “risk fee” on large banks that rely on volatile short-term funding, which could evaporate in a crisis. The other is to give regulators the power to force large financial institutions to “reorganize, downsize, or break apart” if they cannot manage themselves effectively.

Unfortunately, there’s less here than meets the eye. The Federal Reserve and the Financial Stability Oversight Council can already force a large financial institution to scale back its operations if it poses a grave risk to the financial system. (That’s the Kanjorski Amendment, or Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act). And per Dodd-Frank, regulators also have the power to make life difficult for systemically important financial institutions in all sorts of ways—they can impose capital requirements, leverage limits, liquidity requirements, disclosures, or short-term debt limits. (For the most part, though, these tools haven’t been widely used.) In short, when it comes to too-big-to-fail banks, Clinton is proposing very little beyond what currently exists—nor does she explain how she will get regulators to use the powers they already have.

It sure sounds good, though—which is the whole point. Clinton is losing ground to Bernie Sanders, of all people, whose biggest political asset is his willingness to say what he actually believes. In response, Clinton is trying to portray herself as the responsible adult who really understands the complexity of the financial system and how to fix it—as opposed to an ignorant Luddite who just wants to dismantle things. Hence the long list of regulatory “enhancements”: The premise of Clinton’s plan is that sweeping reforms such as restoring Glass-Steagall are childish, so instead she has to use complexity to communicate seriousness.

If the past seven years—the ones since the financial crisis—have demonstrated anything about the financial system, however, it’s that regulators have little chance of containing the risks posed by large banks such as JPMorgan and Citigroup. Even the CEOs of those banks, by their own admission, cannot grasp the risks they face. What do the London Whale, money laundering, LIBOR fixing, currency manipulation, bribery, the Bernie Madoff scandal, and foreclosure fraud have in common? The CEOs of the banks involved—according to their own statements—had no idea they were going on.