“You say tomayto, I say tomahto.” The bedfellows of the US Congress – the hyperactive House of Representatives and the more austere Senate – tend to have rather different views on life. So while the former trod delicately round the sensibilities of the various US bank regulators, the chairman of the Senate banking committee, Chris Dodd, has proposed crunching them into one body. Opposition is inevitable from those, including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that would lose powers to the new creation, even before anyone in Washington has ploughed through 1,136 pages of draft legislation.

The themes, however, of the latest proposals for overhauling financial regulation – additional consumer protection, ending “too big to fail” and greater oversight of derivatives, to name but a few – remain the same. So, structural flash-points aside, it is possible to see how this can be melded with the House’s proposal as the legislative process edges towards its conclusion. Meanwhile, the White House has indicated a willingness to consider the more dramatic solution of one über-regulator.