If you have a bank with, say, $10-billion in shareholders' equity, and you decree that it can use only 20 times leverage rather than 30 - congratulations, you've made the financial system more stable. But you've also just removed $100-billion from it.
But for the banks and investors who hold AIG debt, or are on the winning side of its bad derivatives trades, what's the lesson? Deal with somebody who's too big and complicated to fail, and if all goes badly, the taxpayer will do the hard work. That's moral hazard on a massive scale, and while Mr. Paulson may take it seriously, he's discovering that it's not so easy to rid the financial system of it. 
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clipped from www.theglobeandmail.com
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