Forecasting how the emerging regime of global financial regulation will respond to the next financial crisis involves a sense of its limits, and underscores the way that law-like constraints mesh with the need for administrative discretion. Traditionally, crisis response is the sort of government work that is most amenable to discretion. Because crises are difficult to predict, flexibility may be necessary to effectively respond. The values of effective crisis response – promptness, overwhelming force, perhaps a degree of surprise–are not amenable to ordinary values of bureaucratic order. This, however, does not mean that crisis response is a law-free zone. There are few crises that have not been dealt with by a response inflected by the legal and process constraints of ordinary administration, even if the requirements of crisis interdiction have forced regulators more concerned with effectiveness than with process to act with flexibility and evasion.

This, however, does not mean that crisis response is a law-free zone. There are few crises that have not been dealt with by a response inflected by the legal and process constraints of ordinary administration, even if the requirements of crisis interdiction have forced regulators more concerned with effectiveness than with process to act with flexibility and evasion.