WASHINGTON—After almost five years of rule making and standard setting, regulators are very nearly almost just about ready to have in place a regulatory framework that maybe kind of sort of might have prevented the 2008 financial crisis.

Jim Jenkins, a spokesman for the CFTC explained, “At this point in time I am cautiously optimistic that the reforms we have enacted mean that the next crisis will probably not result from excessive subprime mortgage lending that inflates a housing bubble while at the same time those mortgages are securitized and repackaged into complex derivatives of unknown, correlated risk that is mispriced on the balance sheets of overleveraged banks, and thus when returns on the underlying subprime mortgage assets underperform erroneous expectations, balance sheets across the financial industry are ergo found to be drastically misvalued to a degree that interbank trust, and thus lending, grinds to a halt, sparking a classic credit crisis.”

Jenkins, who is also a spokesman for the Federal Reserve (no conflict of interest!) added, “Yep, pretty sure we closed that loophole.”

When asked how regulators were preparing for any future crisis developing along a different path, Jenkins mumbled something about “central clearing of derivatives” and suddenly remembered another meeting he had to get to.