By Aaron Klein

It is in vogue to compare financial regulators to cops on the beat. While the image has an understandable appeal, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. Instead, let’s consider a different analogy, that of a food safety inspector.

When you buy meat at the supermarket you probably don’t think twice about its safety. Government regulation of meat, spurred by the writings of Upton Sinclair more than a century ago, solved what was then a rampant food safety problem and laid the foundation for what has become a modern market success.

However, imagine that your beef was not inspected by a trained beef inspector, but instead by a poultry inspector. A poultry inspector will be alert to signs of avian flu but not necessarily hoof and mouth disease. Would you still have the same trust in the safety of your meat?

Mismatched regulators

Something similar is happening with the regulation of financial products.

Among the many provisions of

By Robert Hahn and Peter Passell

“We’re canceling our membership in the out-of-touch wireless-carrier-club,” proclaimed T-Mobile in announcing its Simple Choice pricing plan. That’s good news for consumers in the sense that more options are always – well, almost always – better than fewer. And the switch has probably already accomplished what T-Mobile set out to do, providing a boost to the image for a carrier that lags behind Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T) and Sprint (S) in wireless market share.

But the idea that T-Mobile’s decision to unbundle the cost of handsets from the monthly charges for the use of its network is a giant stride forward for consumers is a bit of a stretch. Indeed, the carrier’s willingness to reduce the sticker shock on $600 smartphones by lending money to their customers suggests that T-Mobile understands very well why the wireless carrier industry adopted the razor/razor-blade pricing model in the first place.

Almost everybody knows that the offer of the latest iPhone