Members of the Deseret News editorial board did a double take last week when our conference room filled with bankers and credit-union officials — and they actually were friendly to each other.

These Hatfields and McCoys (critics might say Bloods and Crips) have come to that table separately many times over the years, anxious to stake a claim in the opinion war over proposed laws distinguishing between them and taxing those differences.

But, as the ancient proverb says, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." And in this case, their common enemy is one many readers can identify with — Washington.

President Barack Obama and leading congressional Democrats are so sure they can legislate away market crashes and cyclical downturns that they are on the verge of creating a new federal bureaucracy with broad regulatory powers. This new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would regulate, in detail, services provided by banks and credit unions.

It's being billed as an independent agency to protect consumers. But here's how the White House defines independent — four of the agency's five board members would be chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It would, in other words, be about as independent of the White House as my remaining under-18 children are of my house.

In its original form, the bill would have forced banks to offer government-designed loans and services, and to give those preference over the banks' own products. But the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has watered things down a bit. Still, the bill would separate the rules that protect consumers from those designed to keep banks sound. The two, in reality, ought to go together. As a background paper handed to us in the meeting puts it, "one person's deposit is another person's loan." If you try to regulate one separately from the other, you're asking for trouble.

It also might eventually make credit-card rules so complicated banks would stop offering them. And with everyone focused on health-care reform, all 150-plus pages of it could become law without much scrutiny.

I don't have too many rules of thumb when covering issues of this sort, but one is to distrust solutions that come from the very people who caused the problem.

Sure, banks and credit unions don't always wear white hats. Exorbitant overdraft fees and credit-card interest rates, for example, help no one. But for Washington to pretend it can legislate away financial insecurity with a new bureaucracy — well, it's not only absurd, it's dishonest.