I have worked (a lot) with regulators, and here's how it goes: if a regulation exists, lobbying to change it is almost impossible. It sometimes works, but banks have finite resources, believe it or not, and they have to carefully choose their battles. I'll give you an example of regulation that was changed following such lobbying: starting in 2016 you need to post initial margin on any non-cleared derivatives you do (with some exceptions). Banks do a lot of internal trades between any of their hundreds of legal entities. Well, the regulation included those trades too, and for many banks the margin posted on these trades exceeded (by a factor of 2 or 3) the margin posted on the genuine, external trades. One could argue this type of margin was quite nonsensical and it was draining something close to $100 BN from the financial markets. At some point the regulation was changed to eliminate this. Still, the way regulators work, it was not simply voided. The banks need to continue to monitor how much margin they would need to post on these internal trades, and check against their capitalization, and if the capitalization is not enough, they need to start posting the margin.
What is the point of my anecdote? Banks have sometimes legitimate reasons to lobby. Even when they have, lobbying is very difficult, and the results are always quite convoluted. They don't get exactly what they wish.
> But powerful actors prevent this
In other words, the powerful actors are not that powerful.
To give a few more details. To change some regulations, it is not only necessary to grease a pair of hands in Washington. There are hundreds of government officials involved in the actual details of drafting the regulations, and many of them are quite rigid. You could say, "no problem, the top guy will propagate some of the grease down the ladder". This probably happens in a country like Russia, but in Western countries it's very difficult to pull a lot of government officials into a conspiracy.
Now, to your points. I think you are actually making two points, not one.
1. banks need to change how they lend to the good guys 2. banks need to change how they lend to the bad guys
And maybe a third:
3. banks like the way they currently do business, thank you very much, and they lobby against any change, be it for the good guys or for the bad guys. In that, they are the "powerful (bad) actors" you talked about.
While my argument before is that lobbying to change regulations (either existing or incoming) is hard, I will contend that lobbying to prevent new regulations is probably not that hard, because democracies are a bit dis-functional to some extend. They need to be: a democracy has lots of checks and balances to prevent bad things happening, and a side effect is that sometimes these checks and balances make it hard to enact good changes. We need to live with this fact of life.
So, it does not take that much lobbying to make Congress not pass a law.
Despite that, at least in the US, Congress managed to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, and this is a huge victory.
Let's stop here. Would you at least agree with me that the IRA was a good law, and it is real progress towards our green goals?
As for solutions, I'm not proposing any, I talked enough already.