Thursday, 18 December 2008

The wisdom of regulation?

It's not always a good idea:

Without the false sense of security given by the government regulation of financial markets, investors would surely have been far more careful about where they put their money. They would have investigated the risks involved more fully and favoured reputable, conservative institutions.

Instead of investors in general having a responsibility for monitoring their counterparties we have handed the job over to a government institution. When that fails - tough. Also, the key objective for a financial institution is not to build reputation and trustworthiness but to make sure it complies with what the regulator wants. Financial institutions look upwards towards the regulator and not downwards towards their clients.



Which is obviously what the government wants, but is it any good for us poor saps who pay for all this shit?

Oh, and anything who says the banks aren't regulated enough will get a shoe in their face.

3 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

The main instigator of the current problems was the regulator creating a massive credit bubble by negligently administrating their currency monopoly.

Anonymous said...

Property boom = illegal Pyramid selling scam orchestrated by the banks.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Is that why Dubya got a shoe in the face (nearly)? What was the other one for?

AC1 & IEBOC, nope, the housing pyramid scheme was orchestrated by our own gummint (along with others) as a fail safe way of creating an illusion of wealth and economic growth. The 'banks' as such are victims in all of this (except for the lucky employees with their billion pound bonuses).