John Mack, for one, welcomes our new bearded overlords.

“We have probably 15 to 20 Fed regulators in our building 24 hours a day,” Mack said yesterday at the “Covering the Crisis” panel discussion hosted by Bloomberg News and Vanity Fair in New York. “They test our models. They question everything we do. I’ve never been regulated like that before. It’s a different environment. Someone said to me, ‘What do you think of it?’ I love it.”

We are quite certain that whenever Ben Bernanke romances his wife, her first breathless words afterwards are “I’ve never been regulated like that before.” Yeah, that’s right. I said it.

Mack just doesn’t feel like he and his neighbors on Wall Street are up to the task of behaving, and so require the services of a four-thousand-dollar an hour call girl with a whip and a mean streak, to keep them in line.

Mack, 65, said he even reached out to regulators after turning down the chance to finance a highly leveraged deal during the credit boom.

“I missed a piece of business,” Mack said he told the regulators. “I can live with that, but as soon as I hung up the phone someone else put up 10 times leverage. We cannot control ourselves. You have to step in and control the Street.”

In John Mack’s future, we can all look forward to notices from the Fed which read, in total, “Increase your Tier 1 capital ratio, worm!” And gimp suits. Lots and lots of gimp suits.