Tag: regulation

So Much Going on …

One of the challenges of the current financial crisis/credit crunch/recession/whatever you call the mess that we’re in is that there are so many things going on at once – stabilizing the financial system, housing, economic stimulus, regulation, emerging markets crisis, now incipient currency crisis, … Luckily, there are many other smart commentators out there working weekends when we all should be spending more time with our families.

On the topic of regulation and economic stimulus, Mark Thoma cites and expands on Larry Summers, who argues that we need to not just give the economy a boost in the short term, but take advantage of the opportunity to take steps – both investments and regulation – to boost productivity in the long term.

Mark Thoma (again) and Yves Smith both provide roundups and analysis of the currency crisis, which Simon raised a couple of days ago. Quick summary: it could be bad.

So if you can’t sleep, there’s plenty to read and worry about. (Or you could watch the World Series.)

Nobel Laureates Debate Financial System Regulation

The Economist is hosting a debate on financial system regulation between no less than two Nobel Laureates, Myron Scholes and Joseph Stiglitz. (Be sure to read the opening statements before the rebuttals, or it may not make sense.) The debate is less over specifics than over the general question of how much regulation there should be. They may be lying low right now, but there will surely be legions of executives and economists arguing that we actually need less regulation in order to foster financial innovation.

The Economist recruited Scholes to defend this view, but unfortunately he puts on a rather tepid defense. I read his arguments three times and I think they boil down to this: Crises stem from too much leverage, and therefore bank capital requirements should be increased. (He also says, however, that “Determining the amount of leverage to be used by financial institutions is a business decision.”) If banks need additional capital in a crisis, it should be provided by the government and priced accurately. In his rebuttal he also proposes a new accounting framework, potentially implemented by a regulator, that provides a more accurate assessment of the risk faced by a financial institution. So, as far as I can tell, it boils down to: (a) higher capital requirements; (b) government capital in times of crisis; and (c) better accounting. For the rest, we can count on existing laws against things like fraud. Unfortunately, the only evidence he provides for the thesis that “more regulation is bad” is that economic growth was lower from the 1930s to the 1970s, which he calls an era of regulation, than since the 1970s, an era of deregulation. (Like everything in history, economic growth levels are overdetermined, meaning that you can find a dozen different explanations of any given historical phenomenon.)

Stiglitz doesn’t do such a great job proving the “more regulation is good” thesis, either; his evidence is that countries with “strong regulatory frameworks” are less likely to have financial crises. But Stiglitz gets at the basic question: is unbridled financial innovation good or bad? Does it really lower the cost of capital enough to compensate for the costs of crises like the current ones? Which innovations are good and which are bad? Can we get the good ones without the bad ones?

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Regulating the Financial Sector: A Modest Proposal

Building a new regulatory structure for the financial sector to replace the current, completely discredit regulatory structure will be a major task for the next administration and congress. However, at present there is a wide range of opinion over what needs to be done – believe it or not, there are those out there who think that what we need is less regulation rather than more. We’ll be pointing out serious proposals that we find out there. Note that linking does not necessarily constitute endorsement.

James Crotty and Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts have put forth their nine-point plan for financial system regulation (abstract online, or download the PDF – it’s only 13 pages). Most economists (though perhaps not most people) would classify them somewhere on the heavy-handed end of the spectrum. The nine points, in summary, are:

  1. Restrict or eliminate off-balance sheet vehicles
  2. Require due diligence by creators of complex structured financial products (so if you create a CDO, you have to understand all the stuff in it)
  3. Prohibit the sale of financial securities that are too complex to be sold on exchanges
  4. Transform financial firm incentive structures that induce excessive risk-taking (so people who get big bonuses in good years have to pay them back in bad years)
  5. Extend regulatory over-sight to the “shadow banking system” (hedge funds, private equity, special investment vehicles)
  6. Implement a financial pre-cautionary principle (like with drugs, innovations have to be approved first)
  7. Restrict the growth of financial assets through counter-cyclical capital requirements (um … read the proposal yourself)
  8. Implement lender-of-last-resort actions with a sting (punish the people responsible when you bail out their companies)
  9. Create a bailout fund financed by Wall Street (use a securities transaction tax to create a bailout fund to use next time)

I’m skeptical about 4 and 8 – human ingenuity is perhaps nowhere so unparalleled as in the creation of executive compensation schemes designed to avoid any possible constraint. 3 and 6 will be extremely controversial and can be seen as infringements on freedom of contract, at least where “sophisticated” investors are concerned. 9 is also controversial, although a variant of it was actually in the $700 billion bailout bill. But it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about it now.