Are you tired of it yet? “We are all for financial reform,” the Wall Street story goes. “But we can’t have regulations that make us anti-competitive.”

Another financial crisis like the last one and you have to wonder who we’d be worrying about competing against. Whatever. The financial industry is very busy trying to make the case that before we can make new rules, we have to prove that the benefits outweigh the costs. I write about it in my latest column for Bloomberg View:

To get an idea of who has the upper hand in this fight, consider what it entails to be the chump who has to explain the “benefits” side of financial regulation. Costs can be easy to figure out. But how do you put a dollar figure on credit markets that don’t collapse? Or the elderly who don’t lose their life savings because regulators have cracked down on rip-off artists who troll retirement villages?

The object of the exercise is to swamp regulators with work and make rule-making impossible. The strategy is working. Read article.