All Posts Tagged With: "regulation"
Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
Free-market greed stands accused of undermining the world financial system, but that is a mistaken analysis, writes Johan Norberg. The Swedish author made famous by his book In Defence of Global Capitalism is back to provide an explanation for the current financial crisis. Many factors led to the global financial fiasco, Norberg writes, including a [...]
20May2010 | Waldemar Ingdahl | 23 comments | ContinuedNuclear Energy Should Be Subsidized?
In a March 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Jump-starting Nuclear Energy,” Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who now co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, lauds the Obama administration for its decision to “guarantee loans for two advance-design nuclear plants in Georgia.” Nuclear energy diversifies our energy portfolio and doesn’t pollute the air the way fossil [...]
20May2010 | Art Carden and Mike Hammock | 9 comments | ContinuedThey Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators
What a stunning book! They Made America is a big glorious coffee-table kind of book that deserves to be picked up and read, not just dusted occasionally. Harold Evans (actually, Sir Harold—this former editor of the London Times was knighted in 2004) has given us a marvelous compendium of short biographies on American inventors and [...]
18May2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedRegarding the Oil Spill
“Self-regulation” in a corporate-state context is not the free market. The oil companies reportedly opposed government regulation supposedly intended to prevent spills, saying they could monitor themselves. They prevailed in that contest, but although new regulation was held in abeyance, pro-industry intervention dating back many years was never repealed. So the choice has been between [...]
11May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedMr. Obama and the Bankers: “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly”
Speaking to a very receptive Elyria, Ohio, crowd a few months ago, President Obama took off the gloves and promised that he was ready to fight to provide more jobs, improved education, and security from the threat of bankruptcy for homeowners. Turning his attention to the Wall Street bankers, who had just announced another round [...]
20Apr2010 | Bruce Yandle | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Insanity of Government “Reform”
The belief that government continually “reforms” itself, correcting earlier “mistakes” and moving toward “perfection,” has dominated our body politic since the Progressive Era.
7Apr2010 | William L. Anderson | 7 comments | Continued“We Want to be Regulated”
Efforts in Washington to write a major climate-change law are causing some Bootlegger/Baptist coalitions to fall apart and new ones to emerge. In late September Exelon Corporation, a major electric utility, followed industry partners Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and PNM when it resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber opposed the Waxman-Markey [...]
5Jan2010 | Bruce Yandle | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Long and Short of Short Selling
Short selling is a little-understood, much-maligned tactic by which traders can profit from their belief that a company’s stock is overvalued. Following the financial problems of the last two years, short selling has come under fire, with new or revived regulations proposed to curb the practice. It is unpatriotic, destructive, and destabilizing, say the critics. [...]
5Jan2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 12 comments | ContinuedLosing the FDIC
“In the darkest days of the financial crisis a year ago, Sheila Bair was hailed for having predicted the housing bust. Today, the chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is fighting for her agency’s future. “The FDIC was set up in 1933 as part of a successful attempt to rescue the banking system, and [...]
18Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | Continued‘Too Big to Fail’ Banks Could Be Downsized
“An unusual alliance of conservatives and liberals is pushing to break up or downsize banks deemed “too big to fail,” rather than create a new regulatory regime led by the Federal Reserve to try to keep them from getting into trouble again.” (Washington Times, Monday) But still not allowed to fail. FEE Timely Classic: “Too [...]
9Nov2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedMarket Discipline
The Obama administration and its allies in Congress have big plans for the economy. They want the Treasury to prevent systemic risk through the power to, as the New York Times puts it, “seize control of troubled financial institutions, throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by [...]
28Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Mystique of Hedge Funds
Hedge funds are controversial these days. Though it’s unlikely that the average citizen or the average congressman could say just what hedge funds do, many are certain they must be reined in by additional regulation because they can—and do—cause widespread damage to our financial system. Almost everyone takes it for granted that regulation of some sort [...]
23Oct2009 | Warren C. Gibson | 1 comment | ContinuedGetting in Deeper
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector," the Federal Reserve announced yesterday it will regulate executive compensation at all banks so that they will not have incentives to take on too much risk. The term "pretence of knowledge" comes to mind.
23Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 19 comments | ContinuedMissing the Point
Reporting on this year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, the New York Times said: Neither Ms. Ostrom nor Mr. Williamson has argued against regulation. Quite the contrary, their work found that people in business adopt for themselves numerous forms of regulation and rules of behavior — called “governance” in economic [...]
13Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedMeltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
Thomas Woods’s Meltdown is a marvel of writing and publishing. Having arrived on shelves in February, it offers a complete analysis of the causes of the current recession as well as a critical assessment of the mistakes policymakers have already made, and will likely continue to make, in response to the economic decline. The marvel [...]
23Sep2009 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedFree-Marketeers Should Welcome Regulation?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul Singer, chairman of the Manhattan Institute, suggests that “there is an urgent need for a new global regulatory initiative” to address the causes of the worldwide financial collapse and that even those who appreciate the qualities of free markets should welcome the new and different regulations he proposes [...]
23Sep2009 | Peter Lewin | 5 comments | Continued-
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