Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote an article, The Myth of Banking Deregulation, to debunk a lie. The lie is that bank regulation is good. That it helped stabilize the economy in the 1930’s. And that deregulation at the end of the century destabilized the economy and caused the crisis of 2008.
As of early 2015, Dodd-Frank had imposed altogether 27,670 new restrictions, more than all other laws passed under Obama combined (that is really saying something, considering the regulatory frenzy let loose by his administration. Note: the law may have “only” 2,300 pages, but more than 10 different regulatory agencies have been producing administrative laws for six years in a row to put it into practice – and they are not finished yet. Don’t you feel safer already?
If deregulation is the problem, then re-regulation is the solution. So, in the wake of the crisis, Congress enacted a 2,300-page monstrosity of regulation known as Dodd-Frank.
Watkins does a good job describing government regulation of finance, in particular addressing the savings and loan industry. He gives an example where people commonly assume that Congress reduced regulation, the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.
The headline is that this law reduced regulation, and allowed banks to be in the securities business. However, the truth is that it mixed in a dollop of increased regulation.
The economic cost of Dodd-Frank (one guess as to who is going to end up paying for this…). Note: this is not cumulative – the cumulative tally so far is a cost of $36 billion (about $310 per household!); it has so far taken 74.8 million paperwork man hours to create this monster. You will be happy to learn that the law not only makes us perfectly safe, but introduces racial and gender quotas as well. The number of final rules exceeds those generated by Sarbanes-Oxley by a factor of 30 – so far.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
