A Portrait of Regulatory Capture

So the details of Obama's regulatory plans for finance are leaking out, and the picture is not good.

The New York Times makes a big deal about how all the stake-holders were brought in and given a voice:

President Obama’s plan to reshape financial regulation, which he will unveil on Wednesday, is the product of weeks of meetings among government officials, financial experts, lawmakers, industry executives and lobbyists, many of whom were invited to help the White House draft the proposal.

...

In the last two weeks alone, the administration has heard from top executives from Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Allstate, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Travelers, Prudential and Wells Fargo, among others. Administration officials also discussed the president’s plan with the top lobbyists at major financial trade associations in Washington.

So we ave the wrong and incompetent (financial experts), and the criminal and corrupt (industry executives and lobbyists) brought into the big tent in order to make one big happy family on the legislation.

As a result, they get very little right, they just rearrange the deck chairs, giving the Federal Reserve, the least accountable and most culpable of the banking regulators an expanded role, and create a "council of regulators," which will serve to do nothing. It will be where meaningful regulation goes to die.

We already have a model for regulation that works: Roosevelt's regulatory regime set up during the Depression.

It worked until the mid-1970s when Jimmy Carter started, and Ronald Reagan pushed to excess regulation.

About the only rule you need to add to all that is the rule that any new financial instrument is illegal until approved by a regulatory agency.

People may complain that this curtails "innovation," but "innovation" is what got us here.