[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '
')I think I'll trust Wikipedia....

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '
')I think I'll trust Wikipedia....

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', ' ')Bozo.....

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '.')..And I'll trust the panel of world-class economists the Wall Street Journal put together to investigate the cause of the economic problem over the latest anonymous Wikipedia teenager who wrote whatever page it is you are putting your trust in......

[Plantagenet]

The Wall Street Journal has a public site and a subscription site. You can't access links to the subscription site if you aren't a subscriber. However, I'll copy a bit of one of the discussions of the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley on the current economic disaster:

"The crisis on Wall Street has, of course, become a political football. Cries of "moral hazard" and "socialism" on one side are drowned out by charges that the current mess is the result of deregulation, and too cozy a relationship between "Wall Street fat cats" and the current administration in Washington. If only reality were that simple. The blame game will continue, but it won't do much to fix what's broken.

Let's get a few canards out of the way: First, yes, stupidity and cupidity and complacency and hubris are involved, and yes, there is gambling in Casablanca. Second, the idea that there is this thing called "the free market" that governments tame or muck up with regulation is a fiction. Governments create the legal conditions for markets; markets shape what governments can do or are willing to do. Regulation versus free-market is a false dichotomy. Maybe in some theoretical universe, if we could start with a blank slate and construct society anew, it wouldn't be. But we exist in a web of markets and regulations, and the challenge is to respond to problems in such a way so that we decrease the odds of future crises.

And that is where AIG becomes instructive. Even good regulations can't prevent all future crises, especially ones that are the result of new technologies and changes that result from them. The capital flows, derivatives contracts and nearly frictionless interlinking of global markets today are the direct result of the information technologies of the 1990s. The implications weren't known until very recently, so it would have been nearly impossible for regulations to have prevented what is happening. But if good regulation can't prevent crises, bad regulations can cause them.

The current meltdown isn't the result of too much regulation or too little. The root cause is bad regulation.

Call it the revenge of Enron. The collapse of Enron in 2002 triggered a wave of regulations, most notably Sarbanes-Oxley. Less noticed but ultimately more consequential for today were accounting rules that forced financial service companies to change the way they report the value of their assets (or liabilities). Enron valued future contracts in such a way as to vastly inflate its reported profits. In response, accounting standards were shifted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and validated by the SEC. The new standards force companies to value or "mark" their assets according to a different set of standards and levels.

The rules are complicated and arcane; the result isn't. Beginning last year, financial companies exposed to the mortgage market began to mark down their assets, quickly and steeply. That created a chain reaction, as losses that were reported on balance sheets led to declining stock prices and lower credit ratings, forcing these companies to put aside ever larger reserves (also dictated by banking regulations) to cover those losses."

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'C')all it the revenge of Enron. The collapse of Enron in 2002 triggered a wave of regulations, most notably Sarbanes-Oxley. Less noticed but ultimately more consequential for today were accounting rules that forced financial service companies to change the way they report the value of their assets (or liabilities).

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'W')e can debate the details all we wish, but the overall pattern is clear enough: we chopped down all the trees to haul the big statues from the quarry down to overlook the lonesome vast blue ocean.