President Obama will speak today and present yet another argument for more regulation in the markets:

President Barack Obama will say today that the U.S. risks dooming itself to a repeat of the economic crisis unless tougher financial industry regulations are enacted by Congress.

The U.S. was almost dragged into a second Great Depression by “a failure of responsibility — from Wall Street to Washington,” Obama will say later this morning in a speech at Cooper Union in New York, according to excerpts released by the White House. “I believe in the power of the free market,” Obama will tell his audience, echoing the speech he gave at the same site two years ago amid the presidential campaign. “But a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.”

Despite the Photoshop above, we do hope he does so wearing pants.

If you’ve been living under a rock the last few months, some of the key points of the bill include restoring the Volcker Rule in an attempt to keep banks too small to fail (or at least too small to fail in the hot-mess style of Lehman and Bear), “transparency” requirements for derivatives and other complex instruments – which, given that they have the word “complex” in their name, should be interesting – and hiring somebody at the Fed who will be a consumer protection czar of sorts. I have to admit I would really relish the last job, at least if it let me go up to consumers who were about to sign a 18%-interest, 60-month car loan or a option ARM on the house twice the size of what they needed, whack them with a stick and tell them “ur doin it rong,” but you know it won’t. The biggest sticking point has been a $50 billion fund to be set aside for organized unwinding of banks that collapse, the prospect of which has some in Congress (okay, just Republicans) yelling that this means more failbanks and subsequent bailouts are on the horizon. Steny Hoyer had me thinking the other day that they were gonna drop that like it’s hot, though.