Friday, November 18, 2011

A Feature Or A Bug?

Belmont Club » Plugging Every Loophole: "While this investigation is just beginning and will likely take months to complete, what we already know is troubling enough. The story of regulators fixing the problem after the failure of a financial firm sounds all too familiar. Moreover, it seems that the patchwork of regulations and regulators may have allowed the full extent of these problems to remain undetected.
A thicket of regulations, so comforting to Occupy Wall Street, might be the perfect place for noxious financial instruments to lie in wait. The question is whether the undetectability of MF Global’s problems was a bug or a feature is an interesting one. One of the reasons MF Global got away with its high level of risk was that it was designed to fly under the radar — custombuilt to live in the data shadows. ...

That implies that one answer to preventing more MF Globals is not a forest of new regulations but to resolutely ensure that whoever misjudges his business goes bankrupt; and that whoever is guilty is tossed in jail for a long time. If so, there’s an investment opportunity in jail construction and room to fill a lot of soon to be empty places in Washington and New York."
How many times to I have to refer you over to the upper right sidebar's "RUNNER-UP QUOTE OF THE HOLOCENE"? Read it. Then put Wretchard on your daily reading list.

Don't have time to read every day? Turn off the ***d**m TV then.