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January 01, 2010 10:17 PM UTC
3 Comments
Therefore it has no chance of ever getting passed.
you have some things in there that could maybe make sense, but I’m not sold on any of them.
1. What would this agency do? How would they protect consumers? Are we going to be preventing people from making dumb investments? If so, what impact would that have on the financial system (hint, it would be massive in a bad way), and if not, would that mean the agency would be another toothless bureaucratic waste?
2. I’d probably agree with this one, but I’m still not near 100% convinced that breaking up TB2F would do anything. To give an example, consider why economists (or any similar profession) tend to have a “herd instinct” towards false theories — they all use the same tools to look at the same data, leading them all to the same conclusion. Same with banks, if we have 100 small banks instead of 5 big ones, they’ll still all use the same financial tools to leverage themselves into oblivion and then to avoid systemic failure of our financial sector we’d have 100 institutions to clean up instead of 5. Again, I would probably agree with the break-up thing, but before I’d send it through Congress I’d need an answer to the above scenario/question.
3. Where is your empirical proof on this? From what I’ve read, a Tobin Tax seems vindictively justified but unlikely to produce positive results. http://online.wsj.com/article/…
4. What would this accomplish? Unless they’re regulated somehow (by whom? how? what would be acceptable?) trading on open exchanges doesn’t seem to be a good end in of itself.
5. Probably agree on this one too, but really, revoking Glass-Steagal essentially allowed investment banks to pay for their portfolios by raiding liabilities from commercial institutions, so it seems like even with something like GS investment banks would find ways to finance risky endeavors, so I don’t know how that would really solve anything.
6. Ummm, illegal, anyone? Bueller? I’m not a lawyer by any means, but I would think that would be at odds with other non-disclosure laws. Also, what would this accomplish? I don’t understand the prevalent attitude among so many people today that more information will solve anything. Maybe if people were actually rational actors that compared all available information that would be true, but we’re not, so let’s stop pretending and basing policy off that assumption.
7. Again, more information solves what exactly? Plus most information from most federal agencies is available since, as you point out, we’re paying for it and the government works for us.
So some nice ideas (maybe), but overall not nearly enough reasons there to convince anyone that these should be moved through Congress.
Onto question 2 (more briefly).
I think there is enough anti-finance attitude in the country right now that basically anything that is clearly identifiable as “anti-Wall Street” could get enough popular support behind to force passage. However, that would require Dem leadership (particularly in the Senate) to actually have the balls to capitalize on that and take it on the offensive which, after watching the health-care debate, seems unlikely. Secondly, as to your idea on process, I don’t know how you can propose that as a serious question or idea given how often you read this fairly political-savvy blog. You cannot “force” and up or down vote necessarily (particularly in the senate), voting and movement on a bill is rarely (if ever) on the merits of the bill, and pork is generally always necessary to smooth passage of controversial bills. That’s the world of process, by making the bill single-item will not change that, or if it would you haven’t provided a reason as to why it would. By making 7 bills you would be increasing the political fight 7x, not necessarily wise.
It’s these giant bills that take forever because there is so much in them, and so much tweaking that then goes on. Single topic bills move through COngress faster. Some get killed, but again it happens faster.
On the tax, I think reducing the trades on small changes in price could make the market a lot more stable & sane. Friction is many times a good thing.
On transparency, it gives systems the capability to accurately measure what is going on. One big problem we hit in the recession is no one knew how bad of shape the banks were in. The banks didn’t know. And so people assumed the worst.