It was in the last article that someone posted here about that issue. To my knowledge, Investment Banks were never regulated as to their capital ratios (I should know, I used to work at one and spend dozens of hours a week reading balance sheets). The claim that they were ever so regulated surprised me, and especially the claim that the SEC did such regulation which is normally outside of its scope. Sure enough the (sensationalist) article had the salient details buried somewhere down in it. I believe that the rules applied to the banking subsidiary and not at the consolidated entity level, making them easy to avoid with accounting tricks and essentially worthless.

It's not my responsibility to chase down the sources of other people's irrelevant points.