The Obama plan seeks to shut down the Office of Thrift Supervision and replace it with a new national regulator. "The view now is that you can't let the system function on its own and that it needs some guidance and oversight," Bove says.

The OTS, after all, is an easy target. The agency provides national oversight of the thrift industry. Historically, a thrift was a fairly simple business: Take in deposits and make loans, especially mortgage loans. Alas, times and financial innovations change -- and given the rash of bank failures, it's not hard to claim that the OTS was not up to the job.

As banks grew into so-called financial supermarkets, the lines of regulatory oversight become cloudy -- and the OTS wasn't necessarily designed for many of the roles it had to assume. Obama's proposed new national regulator would make it more difficult for companies to pick and choose among regulators -- or even slip through the regulatory cracks. If the new regulator can prevent things like the collapse of Washington Mutual -- once the nation's largest thrift -- then the system and consumer would be better served.