Academic

What Should You Think About the Administration's Reform Proposal?

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

You should think:

• That bureaucratic rationalization is difficult.  I thought that it could be easy to overdo reform.  This reform, as Felix Salmon notes in a withering series of posts, is quite underwhelming.  The systemic regulator is some combination of the Fed and a committee of regulators, which we have had for 20 years (via the President's Working Group), and which there is no reason to believe will be very effective or orderly.  Does regulation by committee ever work?  I suppose it depends on what you think of the Joint Chiefs.
• Regulatory competition does work at times, however, and the proposal retains that.
• That the consumer protection outfit that is being pitched as a centerpiece is probably going to be a lot of ado about nothing ... that plain vanilla product alternative is pretty interesting, though.
• That the Obama blueprint is shorter than the Paulson blueprint, though it retains many, many more agencies, and accordingly has a much more complicated regulatory story to explain.
• That the effort to move insurance oversight a little to the federal government is likely to be stripped from the final legislation (or, more likely, have some very onerous thou-shalt-nots in the governing statute)
• Winners?  FDIC, and the SEC is back from the brink.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).