Business Is Overregulated?

Fortune magazine on the MF Global meltdown:

For more than six months while MF Global insiders were debating the wisdom of Corzine's European bet, it remained a secret to the firm's regulators and investors.
Oversight in the $648-trillion derivatives industry is ineffectual, balkanized and byzantine. That was especially true at MF Global, where at least six different entities shared responsibility. Because the firm serviced both 36,000 futures customers and 318 securities accounts, it had two government regulators: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. But both agencies delegated day-to-day oversight to industry-funded "self-regulators": on the futures side, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the National Futures Association; for the broker-dealer, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Into early 2011, none of these overseers knew about Corzine's RTM trades, although—at least in one case—it wasn't because they didn't ask. Concerned about growing risk from the Euro debt crisis, FINRA had called individual securities dealers in September 2010 to ask how much sovereign debt they held. MF Global officials responded "none," say FINRA officials, even though Corzine had already acquired his first positions. In congressional testimony, FINRA's chairman later gently characterized this as "the lack of a complete response."
Until the spring of 2011, MF Global also revealed virtually nothing about the bet in its public disclosures. The first explicit mention came in a May 2011 annual SEC filing, which described the holding.
After noticing the reference, FINRA concluded that MF Global, under SEC rules, needed to set aside more capital to protect itself. It hadn't set aside an extra penny, treating the sovereign RTMs as though they posed no more risk than U.S. Treasury bills.
MF Global protested mightily, insisting that the positions required no extra capital because they posed zero risk.

What a freaking mess.  We need better regulation, not less regulation.  Especially in finance.