We can't go back. I tried to buy a return ticket to the summer of 2006, but the ticket window was padlocked. There's nothing behind us but a column of dark smoke. We're on our own; the russet-leafed path runs ahead into the black woods. Behind us, we've left our debris of received wisdom, piece by piece, on the side of the road: self-correcting markets, confidence in risk management, the natural bounty of liquidity and leverage, ideological deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Jimmy Cayne, Dick Fuld. We're thinking of dropping Henry Paulson and the Tin Man off any minute now; Ben, Tim and Toto can stay, but they're on probation. And we've got this new guy, Barack, who recently joined us with a brass band -- happily abandoned -- and a new collection of talent. Barack's an inspiring guy -- he's good around the campfire -- but we view his companions with the skepticism of the footsore and weary. We'll see. Better than the old crowd. At least the conversation is fresh.

The world feels old, like a piece of dried fruit. It's hard to squeeze out new ideas. And yet the situation demands -- what? We must break with the past. Consider -- looking ahead -- the looming issue of financial regulation. Ever since Bear Stearns went down, the consensus (granted, one shaped by Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the banks) has been that the Fed should assume the role of a single "market stabilizer." The Fed, seemingly alone of regulatory bodies (perhaps excepting the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.), gets praise for its professionalism and discipline; the New York Fed's market savvy is particularly noteworthy. The Fed seemed to keep its head while others were losing theirs. And, most importantly, the Fed had access to money. As the crisis spread, it became clear that if you lack the bucks (see the Securities and Exchange Commission), you lack the clout. Indeed, more and more large firms -- Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Sachs & Co., American Express, CIT Group, maybe even GMAC -- are dressing up as bank holding companies to receive the succor and protection of the central bank.

There are critics of this inevitable ascendancy. As a regulator, the Fed didn't exactly cover itself in glory with either predatory mortgage lending or derivatives. The Fed isn't really staffed as an über-regulator across markets and finance; it would have to scale up dramatically. But those, of course, are fixable problems; you can blame Greenspan for the regulatory woes, and scaling up is a mere matter of budgets, though how that professionalism fares with much greater size is unknown. Balancing this off is the fact that a unitary Fed is the natural response to a converging market-oriented financial system, which suggests (to digress) that we're not going back to an era of differentiated exposures to the markets, and to specialized regulators. Again, that window seems to be closed.

No, the most urgent criticism of a market-stabilizing Fed is its consequent loss of autonomy as an "independent" actor, a haven of technical skills, uncontaminated by politics. In the absence of a mechanism like a gold standard, we used to believe -- again, in the now-misplaced past -- that monetary control worked best when it wasn't tied to partisanship. Let the wonks perform their wonkery. This nominal independence has regularly been attacked from left and right, and it has, at times, looked fishy; a debate rumbles on about every big Fed decision over which political interests are being placated. But even Greenspan -- particularly Greenspan -- retained a modicum of autonomy; his blind spots were more ideological than partisan, though that's a profoundly arguable statement. Indeed, the more you discuss the "independence" of the Fed, the more ephemeral it seems, like constitutional protections in time of terror. Perhaps it was always a fig leaf, or an anachronism from an industrial past that looks as lost as a viable car industry.

We live in a global consumer democracy. The Keynesian accommodations of the Fed in monetary affairs certainly mirrored its deregulatory impulses as a supervisor, which, in turn, was aligned with the political nation, transcending party or ideology, toward noncyclical growth. Who needs politics when everyone's happy? So perhaps it is wisest -- it's certainly easiest -- to abandon Fed independence that is a mere shell anyway and make the Fed an adjunct of Treasury. And yet, there's a gentleman shambling along just behind Barack. Tall guy with a cigar named Volcker. Apparently, he's the living embodiment of an independent Fed, above and beyond political considerations. Sure, he's old and we have a ton of challenges ahead that requires us to travel light. Still, it would be a pity to leave him behind with Paulson, Christopher Cox and the Scarecrow.