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FINANCIAL REGULATION – LESSONS FROM ICELAND

Dean Baker:

. . . [Iceland’s experience] makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day. Therefore when they say want the government to leave things to the market they are lying. They just want to be able to take risks with taxpayers money, without being fettered by regulations limiting the extent of these risks. In short, the finance boys want a free lunch, not a free market.

FINANCIAL REGULATION – PEOPLE WORTH LISTENING TO

The Roosevelt Institute last week put together a remarkable day of discussion of our financial markets. Here is your portal to that high-level thinking.

It includes this half-hour video. (Spoiler alert: George Soros strongly supports the need for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency – and agrees with Barney Frank that the “compromise” the Senate may adopt to water down the House bill is “a joke.” Jim Chanos wonders why massive criminality has gone unprosecuted. Peter Solomon says people need to get mad. Stanley Sporkin clearly is mad and says regulatory agencies are worthless without strong regulators.)

(Not on that particular stage but very much in the league of those who were: my friend Bob Pozen, who chairs a firm that looks after $150 billion for 5 million investors – perhaps you, among them – and whose book, Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System, is filled with well-thought-out prescriptions.)