When the history is written of Mayor Bloomberg’s presidential campaign — an effort that is “80% probable” if the major parties pick candidates who can be portrayed as extreme, according to his former adviser Ester Fuchs — one of the turning points may well be today. Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to appear in Washington on a panel convened by the Treasury secretary. The other panelists, our Russell Berman reports, are the former Federal Reserve chairmen, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, and President Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, who is now a top executive at Citigroup and who used to run Goldman Sachs. It is hard to think of other presidential candidates who are comfortable in this level of geopolitical high finance, save for Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney.

Mr. Bloomberg is in Washington to press the case for changes that would keep New York as the global financial capital. A chief component is adjusting the overly onerous Sarbanes-Oxley law Congress was panicked into passing after the Enron scandal. The burden of complying with the law has hurt the competitiveness of America’s financial markets. That has implications not only for New York City and Wall Street but also for America, which is why the Treasury Department is having today’s meeting.

The thing that strikes us is that the mayor is approaching the problem with an eye toward a strong executive. The congressman from Queens who is pressing for a legislative re-opening of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, Gregory Meeks, deserves praise for being a Democrat who understands that regulation can be excessive. But what attracts us to Mr. Bloomberg’s approach, as Mr. Berman reports it, is that, like President Bush and even Senator Schumer, who has played a constructive role on this issue, the mayor wants to achieve the Sarbanes-Oxley revisions via the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a sense, that is risky, because changes for the better could be undone by a new president who installs new commissioners and a chairman hostile to business. But it puts the executive branch — to the, unfortunately, debatable extent to which the SEC is part of it — in the driver’s seat on the issue as opposed to Congress. While Mr. Bloomberg is leading on this issue, others who one might think would be concerned with keeping Wall Street strong have been keeping lower profiles. Before the presidential campaign is over, Senator Clinton and Mayor Giuliani will have to be smoked out on this head.