Category Archives: regulation

Gary Weiss has a long profile of Tim Geithner in the June issue of Portfolio, and although he does give Geithner’s side of the story, he gives a lot of space to some very harsh criticisms of the New York … Continue reading →

Jim Surowiecki gives the best description of the difference between rules-based and principles-based regulation, and why a principles-based approach makes sense, that I’ve yet seen: It’s something like the difference between football and soccer. Football, like most American sports, is … Continue reading →

Floyd Norris received an email today from a financial adviser who’s upset at the level of supervision in his industry. No, he doesn’t think there’s too little, he thinks there’s too much: “As a financial adviser at a major Wall … Continue reading →

Bethany McLean makes a seemingly salient point in the latest Fortune: a year ago, in the Bloomberg-Schumer report, Chuck Schumer was saying that there was too much regulatory red tape on Wall Street. Today, he seems to support Hank Paulson’s … Continue reading →

I’m not a big fan of Floyd Norris’s column today, in which he essentially blames regulators in general, and the SEC in particular, for "letting leverage get so far out of hand" that Bear Stearns collapsed. We all know that … Continue reading →

Justin Fox, like me, welcomes OFHEO’s actions with regard to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae this morning. But he wants the new extra liquidity to be temporary: If government, and government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie and Freddie, don’t increase their risk-taking, … Continue reading →

Looking over the full report from the President’s Working Group today, I’m struck by one thing above all: that it makes no mention of the alphabet soup in Washington which enabled regulatory arbitrage and a general lack of accountability or … Continue reading →

We’ll get all the details later this morning, but judging from Damian Paletta’s curtain-raiser in the WSJ, Hank Paulson has some pretty good ideas about shoring up the US financial system and ensuring that a crisis like the one we’re … Continue reading →

Roger Ehrenberg has a sensible call for, among other things, "common regulatory frameworks": regulators around the world should all be singing from the same songbook, he says, in order to minimize regulatory arbitrage as well as reduce the "immense friction … Continue reading →

Paul Jackson has a smart take on the news today that Finra is investigating sales of mortgage-backed securities to retail investors. Basically, MBSs come in two flavors: very safe, and very dangerous. Since sales of very-safe securities wouldn’t trigger a … Continue reading →

David Cay Johnston’s headline says it all: "Competitively Priced Electricity Costs More, Studies Show". When states deregulate their electricity sectors, the price of electricity goes up, not down – and the attempts of pro-deregulation advocates to spin the data otherwise … Continue reading →