financial regulation

Obama’s Tax on the Big Bad Banks

Way back in January of 2010, during his short-lived “fat cat” bashing phase, Obama proposed a tax on the nation’s largest financial institutions with the stated intent of recouping taxpayer losses from the 2008 bank bailouts. Even by that point, the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s price tag was shaping up to be much lower than the …

Tim Geithner Owns the Economy, Too

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the last remaining principal from President Obama’s original economic team, apparently may step down once the debt ceiling gets sorted out. The obvious point to make about Geithner is that …

Re: How to Make Regulation Work

In his post today, Mike Grunwald bravely admits that “regulation is tricky” and “I’m not entirely sure what I think about these problems.”

Here’s one way to think about: As a general rule, regulations that require large numbers of fallible human government employees to ferret out wrongdoing are destined not to work very well.