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Another failed regulator looks set to be given more things to regulate. Not the QCA or the CSA or the DPA, but this time, the FSA.
Gordon Brown wants to give his favourite quango, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), power to set prices and incomes within financial institutions. This expansion of regulatory powers comes after the FSA proved pretty hopeless at using what powers it did have to prevent the credit bubble.
For the past decade, the FSA has imposed ever more rules on banks and businesses. Entire compliance departments had to be set up to cope with all that the FSA demanded.
Yet in doing so, it was wielded a sledge hammer to - in Christopher Booker's great phrase - miss a nut. Despite all the box ticking, no one thought to examine banks basic asset to liability ratios.
Now, well run banks that avoided being taken into state-ownership risk being dragged into a nightmare of corporatist banking. It will be a world in which bankers' profit margins owe more to political graft, than to giving customers the services they want. It'll be a world in which Widmerpool and Wesley Mouch thrive - while ordinary folk and businesses go under.
Halt the slide into state quango banking. Take an axe to the FSA.
