The last time we came down this hard on one of the few diligent, competent, agressive, uncorrupted regulators with a weird mixture of old boys club sexism and tribal spinal reflex gang flag posturing was in 1996 give or take when Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers came after Brooksley Born as the Chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and forced her out via bunch of irregularities and other scandal-worthy maneuver.

Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology).

If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO.

God knows what the price will be this time.