Simon Johnson, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

There is much to worry about in President Obama’s financial regulation proposal, officially unveiled on Wednesday. It’s a long wish list, but intense and nontransparent financial sector lobbying already ensured that four out of the five sets of measures are unlikely to have any lasting positive impact.

As Stephen Labaton reports:

“In the last two weeks alone, the administration has heard from top executives from Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Allstate, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Travelers, Prudential and Wells Fargo, among others. Administration officials also discussed the president’s plan with the top lobbyists at major financial trade associations in Washington.”

What is the outcome of all this behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the financial sector fully on board? Not much change that we can really believe in.

For example, take the points that President Obama himself stresses (e.g., in this interview). First and foremost, he says the Federal Reserve will become the official “system risk regulator” (section 1 of his proposal). But in principle the Fed had exactly this kind of leadership role before — and under both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke it was a reckless cheerleader and facilitator for the unsustainable real estate boom.

If the Fed had been stronger before, the crisis now would be worse.

Hedge funds and other private pools of capital have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, also in section 1. But the once-proud S.E.C. has fallen on hard times, effectively just as much captured by the intellectual bubble of Wall Street as all our other regulators.

Originators of securitized products will be required to retain some stake in what they issue (section 2). But the major shock of early 2008 was when we learned that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and others had done exactly that. There is no serious attempt here to recognize that our leading financial firms have completely failed in their efforts to measure and control risks.

In addition, the administration will now seek a “resolution authority” that makes it easier to take over and shut down large financial companies (section 4 in the proposal). But effectively they had this power before — Continental Illinois, for example, was handled as a negotiated conservatorship in the 1980s, and Citigroup could have been taken over at various points in the past nine months. The government blinked in the face of financial sector complexity and scale. “Too big to fail” is “too big to exist,” but the president’s document goes nowhere near this fundamental principle.

And while the proposal is no doubt right to emphasize the need for international cooperation in re-regulation, section 5 is so vague as to be meaningless.

There is, however, one interesting piece — the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (section 3). The president himself seems to recognize that previous consumer protection was scattered and ineffectual. A strong agency could help protect us all both in boom times and during crises.

But protecting consumers is not the same thing as protecting investors and taxpayers. Major financial players will once again be able to float bubbles, creating the illusion of growth and the reality of further expensive bailouts.

Our financial sector has become very powerful politically — and these proposals are a further sad reminder of that fact.