Posts Tagged ‘regulation’
By James Kwak I’ve already introduced you to the Springfield biomass plant proposed by Palmer Renewable Energy (PRE). The issue in that post was PRE’s witnesses’ apparent unfamiliarity with the voluminous evidence that ambient air pollution increases both the incidence and the severity of asthma, along with other diseases. In addition, PRE is claiming that [...]
By James Kwak I just read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food, and what struck me was the parallels between the evolution of food and the evolution of finance since the 1970s. This will only confirm my critics’ belief that I see the same thing everywhere, but bear with me for a minute. Pollan’s [...]
By James Kwak It’s been widely noted that financial reform is now entering a new phase as the action moves from Congress to the regulatory agencies that will write the hundreds of rules necessary to implement the reforms. During the congressional fight, the financial sector had a huge advantage in money and lobbyists, but we [...]
By James Kwak There has been a lot of criticism of regulatory agencies in the past couple of years, from the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Securities and Exchange Commission (Madoff who?) to the Minerals Management Service. But most of the people in these agencies are not evil; on the contrary, I believe (without [...]
By James Kwak First there was the financial crisis. Then there was the West Virginia mine explosion. Now we have the BP oil leak. In each case, we were treated to news stories about the cozy relationships between the industry and the regulators who were supposed to be regulating it. (Here’s the latest New York [...]
By James Kwak Ezra Klein focuses on this passage from John Judis’s review of regulatory policy in the Bush and Obama years: “Bush stopped weighing the costs and benefits of deregulation and issued an executive order allowing OIRA to intercede before agencies made their initial proposals, thereby providing industry lobbyists with a back door to [...]
This guest post was submitted by Peter Fox-Penner, a leading expert on regulation at The Brattle Group. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone. At present, the debate among economists over whether our financial regulations should protect institutions on the basis that they are “too big to fail” (TBTF) still rages. Like many other [...]
The American Economics Association is meeting in Atlanta, where Simon says it is frigid. I went to an early-January conference in Atlanta once. There was a quarter-inch of snow, the roads turned to ice, and everything closed. All flights were canceled, so I and some friends ended up taking the train to Washington, DC, which [...]
One of our readers pointed me to a paper by Edward Kane with the unfortunately complicated title “Extracting Nontransparent Safety Net Subsidies by Strategically Expanding and Contracting a Financial Institution’s Accounting Balance Sheet.” The paper is an extended discussion of regulatory arbitrage — not the specific techniques (such as securitization with various kinds of recourse) [...]
I would like to strongly recommend Steve Randy Waldman’s recent post on “Discretion and Financial Regulation.” He begins like this: “An enduring truth about financial regulation is this: Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.” It gets better from there. In fact, I’d recommend it over anything I’ve [...]
Taunter has a comprehensive proposal about how to regulate financial services, dividing them into Boring and Exciting. Boring services are the following: retail deposits loans to retail customers, including mortgages retail insurance, including annuity products any custodial service beyond traditional settlement (i.e., if you hold something after T+3, you’re a custodian) If you do any [...]
Mark Kleiman (hat tip Brad DeLong) says more clearly what I tried to say a while back: cost-benefit analysis of regulations has a curious way of nailng the costs and underestimating the benefits. He focuses on three points: Traditional CBA counts all dollar benefits equally, despite the fact that the marginal utility of a dollar [...]
We received the following email from James Coffman in response to Bond Girl‘s recent guest post, “Filling the Financial Regulatory Void.” Coffey agreed to let us publish the email. As he says below, he spent 27 years in the enforcement division of the SEC. Bond Girl’s “Filling the Financial Regulatory Void” provided insight into human deficiencies in [...]
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Not All Businessmen Are Smart, You Know
June 6, 2011 in Commentary
Tags: regulation
By James Kwak Stephen Carter, a professor at the Yale Law School and an accomplished novelist, wrote a Bloomberg column based on a conversation with a medium-sized business owner he met on a plane. The gist of the column is that the businessman isn’t hiring more workers because he’s worried about the regulations changing on [...]