In his speech two days ago, Hank Paulson remarked - possibly in order to ward off the criticism that the plan was a hasty response to the crisis - that the group of authors had been working on it since March 2007. But it seems that they have been closeted away from the crisis that has hit the markets since. The preamble contains rather a lot about "promoting a competitive financial services sector leading the world and supporting continued economic innovation at home and abroad" and not so much about "reducing the risk of the financial sector creating another ghastly mess like the one they're in now". Even to the point where (on p17) you have passages like this:

The SEC should issue a rule to update and streamline the self-regulatory organization
(“SRO”) rulemaking process to recognize the market and product innovations of the past two decades. The SEC should consider streamlining and expediting the SRO rule approval process... The SEC should also consider streamlining the approval for any securities products common to the marketplace... An updated, streamlined, and expedited approval process will allow U.S. securities firms to remain competitive with the over-the-counter markets and international institutions and increase product innovation and investor choice...
The SEC should ...permit the trading of those products already actively trading in the U.S. or foreign jurisdictions.

It's an odd sort of person who pops his head up now, in 2008, to say "I know what the problem with the US financial system is - it's far too difficult for firms to produce really innovative complex financial products and get them onto the market!"

More generally, the Plan's authors seem to be very concerned about the need for the US to keep hold of its status as the home of the world's leading financial markets - they think, it appears, much more in relative terms than absolute. The threat to the US from their point of view, it seems, is not "our financial regulatory system has flaws which could damage the economy" but "other people's financial markets are growing faster than ours" and it shouldn't take a professional economist to point out that the latter is not, in any meaningful sense, a threat at all.