Setting off a year ago, the financial crisis has forced banks to write off billions of dollars, on top of entrapping hundreds of thousands of people into bankruptcy. Not long ago, the three strokes of Act Two sounded. It's theme? Reregulation and the rat race it will give rise to.

    Of all the episodes that have punctuated this economic soap opera, that of investment bank Bear Stearns proves the richest in lessons as diverse as they are predominant. First of all, because the episode highlights Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke's profound fear of being witness to a tragedy comparable only to the Great Depression of the 1930's. In order to avoid its repetition, Bernanke opened the credit floodgates by injecting billions and billions of dollars of liquidity in several stages.

    But above all, he orchestrated the rescue of Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street's most important financial establishments, specifically by piloting its acquisition by JP Morgan. Today, we are assured that Bernanke was certain, not merely intuiting, that should Bear close its doors, the systemic impact would have been inevitable. The whole of Wall Street, the entire edifice, would have gone down the toilet, with all that implies, most notably for troops of unemployed.

    The rescue of a bank reputed to be the most dynamic in its sector because its product range offered the most imposing number of complex financial products had this notable particularity: the regulatory authority that controls Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and others is the stock market policeman, the SEC, and not the Fed, which has authority over commercial banks.

    Thanks to that rescue, we have watched the Fed's intrusion into territory previously forbidden - or more precisely, reserved for another regulatory regime. So why that penetration? How was it justified? After in-depth study of the usages and customs observed by Wall Street's denizens, Bernanke, as well as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, arrived at the conclusion that the explanation - the raison d'être - for the multiplication of very complex financial vehicles was investment bankers' intention to put themselves as far beyond the reach of regulatory authorities as possible.

    To this vicious ambition, one must add the rise in power of investment funds - Cerberus, the Carlyle Group and others which escape from many of the controls that some of their competitors are subject to. With these financial tools and these funds appearing on neither the Fed's radar nor on that of the SEC, Bernanke and Paulson obviously agreed that a call to discipline had to be launched.

    This was all the more urgent in that, after subprimes, exotic mortgages and debt-backed commercial paper, another series of shenanigans has recently been brought to light, that is, evidently, the sale of auction-rate, especially municipal, securities. Brokers and banks have deliberately swindled agencies, pension funds and savers. That's when federal prosecutors entered the scene.

    Let's take the example of Andrew Cuomo, sheriff for the state of New York. After penalizing the rating agencies Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch for wandering astray, "voilà!" after negotiations with Citigroup and UBS, out-of-court settlements have been concluded. A sign of the extent of the misappropriations committed: Citigroup copped a $20-billion-dollar buyback penalty. The problem? By conducting negotiations with the executives of these establishments, Cuomo has de facto interfered in the debate on regulation, and that to the great displeasure most notably of the lawyers for the investors damaged by Citigroup and its consorts.

    O.K. A host of financial products invented for their opacity has forced the government to intervene by putting billions and billions of dollars on the table that taxpayers will be called upon to reimburse. Hundreds and hundreds of individuals and companies have literally been swindled without the crooks at the source of these misappropriations being the least inconvenienced following out-of-court settlements.

    The cause of this fiasco, the source of this disaster, has a name: all-out deregulation. This has nothing to do with any ideological bias, but rather with the logic of rationality crossbred with ethics. In short, to allow self-regulation, self-discipline, as the government has done the last 20 years, amounts to being an accomplice in corrupt practice, to being the very engine of corruption.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.