Less than two years after Wall Street's latest meltdown, US President Barack Obama believes he has found the answer - a mammoth 2,000-page package of reforms that will prevent another financial crisis from ever happening again.
Economists are a little more skeptical - financial panics are a fact of life - but most agree that Congress' passage Thursday of a sweeping regulatory reform bill goes at least some way toward addressing gaps in oversight of greedy Wall Street firms.
The bill "will move us perhaps two-thirds of the way from where we are now on financial regulation to where we need to be," said Douglas Elliott, an economic expert with the Brookings Institution. "In the real world, this is grounds for real congratulations."
The world had been watching a tense debate unfold in the United States for more than a year. The 2008 financial crisis sparked a global recession with lasting effects in Europe and developing countries.
European leaders clamoured for the Obama administration to end the riskiest practices on Wall Street, which had teetered on the brink of calamity as investment banks saw the evaporation of their bets on shaky home mortgages that came crashing down when the US housing market collapsed.
The reforms expand the government's reach into virtually all corners of the financial sector, extending regulation to hedge funds and derivatives markets and increasing oversight of rating agencies that failed to raise warning flags about bank assets ahead of the credit crisis.
The legislation gives government new powers to wind down failing financial firms, creates a council of regulators to monitor systemic risks and a new consumer protection agency to prevent firms from offering misleading financial products.
Notably absent is any reform of the government-run mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which either directly or indirectly controlled more than half of all mortgages in the United States and fuelled the mortgage securitization boom at the heart of the housing bubble.
The Senate gave its final stamp of approval Thursday to the reforms, sending the bill to Obama's desk for signature next week. The lower House of Representatives had approved the bill last month.
What began as a bipartisan reform effort turned mostly into acrimony. Accusations of overregulation and the failure to address Fannie and Freddie marked a key reason Obama failed to bring along many opposition Republicans.
In the end, only three Republican senators joined with 57 of Obama's Democrats. Senator Richard Shelby, the Republicans' key banking expert in the upper chamber, accused Obama of trying to "exploit the crisis in order to expand government further."
Yet the public's outrage over the Wall Street-fuelled recession had blunted the financial sector's efforts to water-down the reform bill. The final product remained relatively close to an initial set of proposals by the Obama administration in the spring of 2009.
Analysts believe the bill will curb bank profits by anywhere from 5 per cent to 20 per cent, largely due to new limits on derivatives trading. Yet for Wall Street, there was an air of inevitability about the entire process.
"This legislation is - or at least soon will be - the law of the land," said Steve Bartlett, head of the Wall Street lobby group the Financial Services Roundtable. "As an industry, we pledge to make it work, because that's our job."
The reforms leave considerable wiggle room for regulators. Congress gave the green light for Obama to set new capital and liquidity standards for banks. This may have to wait, as world leaders hope to agree to global standards by the end of this year.
Obama has touted the legislation as the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s, meant to prevent another financial crisis from striking the country. Economists and the US public are less convinced of its merits.
A Wall Street Journal Poll of 43 US economists found that just 21 supported the final bill. A 58-per-cent majority said the bill would "slightly" reduce the risk of another crisis, while only 6 per cent believed it would have a "significant" impact.
That dovetails largely with the public, which has been supportive of more government regulation but skeptical that the days of financial crises are over. Nearly four in five had little or no confidence that the reforms would prevent another collapse, according to a poll by Bloomberg News.
Elliott argued the bill should go at least some way toward muting the next crisis, when it does inevitably hit.
"The bill will not eliminate financial crises," he said, "but it will make them less frequent and considerably milder, which is all we can realistically accomplish."