As usual, the response to a great failure of regulation was... more regulation. Deposit insurance protected depositors. But offering insured deposits to bankers is like sending your brother-in-law to Las Vegas with your credit card. So the government started extensively regulating how banks invested, and forbade banks to compete for deposits. But people in Las Vegas with your credit card, for 20 years, get creative. From Continental Illinois to the savings and loan Crisis, to the Latin American and Southeast Asian crises, to LTCM, and Bear Stearns, and finally the great crisis of 2008, we repeated the same story: bailout larger classes of creditors, add regulations to try to stop more creative risk taking, add power to regulators who really really will see the next one ahead of time, promise it won’t happen again. Dodd Frank, and today’s “macroprudential” policy are not new, they are just the last logical patch on the same leaky ship.

Labels: economics

# posted by Squach : 12:42 PM   |