No question bank regulators failed to detect, prevent or ameliorate the financial crisis. No question we can do better. The real hard stuff is figuring out how.

It's tempting to think reorganizing and creating new offices to replace those who failed will solve the problem. Or at least help.

But will it? The history of government reorganizations is not promising here. NYU Professor Paul Light studies this kind of thing. He counted some 10 reorganizations of the Department of Defense which began almost immediately after it was formed.

We've already reformed and reorganized the Department of Homeland Security three times.

Now Senator Chris Dodd wants to create a single super-regulator. The new Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration would inherit the supervisory staff of the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

We are talking about a lot of people here.

Experience suggests such reorganizations take many years to pay off, if ever. As Prof. Light says, it is not easy to create a common sense of vision and commitment among a workforce that has been doing things a specific way for many decades.

Light's conclusion: "Reorganizations are easy to propose, but hard to implement."