Throughout 2009 we kept hearing about the need new and more wide-spread financial regulation. That’s when the market was down. Now that it is back up, it looks like new regulations might take a back seat:

So what happened to Frank’s initial fervor? The stock market recovery — the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is up 67 percent since the March 2009 low — drained some anger from the debate, and after months of haggling over health care, legislators heard from their constituents that regulation was no longer a word with magic healing powers.

More important, Frank, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other left-leaning Democrats have had to deal with the New Democrat Coalition, a moderate group inside the party that shares many of the values associated with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded 25 years ago in the belief that Democrats couldn’t win elections without a strong moderate platform.

As Paul Krugman put it yesterday – That ‘1937’ Feeling.