Calling All Regulators

Tyler Cowen makes some good points in the NYT:

[F]inancial regulation has produced a lot of laws and a lot of spending but poor priorities and little success in using the most important laws to head off a disaster. The pattern is reminiscent of how legislators often seem more interested in building new highways — which are highly visible projects — than in maintaining old ones.

The biggest financial deregulation in recent times has been an implicit one — namely, that hedge funds and many new exotic financial instruments have grown in importance but have remained largely unregulated. To be sure, these institutions contributed to the severity of the Bear Stearns crisis and to the related global credit crisis. But it’s not obvious that the less regulated financial sector performed any worse than the highly regulated housing and bank mortgage lending sectors, including, of course, the government-sponsored mortgage agencies.

In other words, the regulation that we have didn’t work very well.

There are two ways to view this history. First, with the benefit of hindsight, one could argue that we needed only a stronger political will to regulate every corner of finance and avert a crisis.

Under the second view, which I prefer, regulators will never be in a position to accurately evaluate or second-guess many of the most important market transactions. In finance, trillions of dollars change hands, market players are very sophisticated, and much of the activity takes place outside the United States — or easily could.

Whole thing here.