The financial services industry will be more closely monitored if much of President Obama’s regulatory plan that was released today gets enacted.

The White House team obviously put a great deal of work and thought into this plan. Congress, industry and the public will now need to go over it carefully. Here are four questions I would suggest to guide the evaluation.

First, would any or all of these regulatory proposals have prevented the financial crisis we are now in if they had been in place in the last five years? In answering this question we should consider realistically whether the new Council that’s being proposed or the beefed up Fed would have done something in response to the bubble and the other signs of problems that were apparent.

Second, would any or all of these proposals prevent the next crisis? We get financial crises every 50-75 years. They have different causes. Is there something about these proposals that are robust to the diverse causes of financial crises.

Third, why didn’t the massive regulatory structure for financial services that was already in place fail to avert the crisis? There are almost 40,000 financial services regulators working at close to 200 state and federal agencies in the US. The federal agencies have many smart lawyers and economists working for them. It is possible that more regulation, and regulating parts of the industry that weren’t regulated, could be the answer. But perhaps fixing existing regulatory agencies—better trained employees, more powers, different ways of doing thing—would work better than creating more agencies and more regulations.

Finally, is it urgent that we reform financial services regulation in the midst of the crisis, and before there is a consensus on the causes of the crisis and the failures of regulation, would we be better off waiting a few years and approaching reform gradually? Regulation always has unintended consequences—some think mark to market encouraged banks to increase leverage and accelerated their downfall when the bubble burst. One wonders whether a massive restructuring of the already complex regulation of a highly complex industry should be done so quickly and while bodies are still burning.