More regulation is not a good thing

Courtesy of the Financial Times

A common interpretation of the credit crunch and ensuing global turmoil is that it was all down to unregulated or under-regulated financial institutions and markets. As a result, one of the most commonly advanced solutions is for more and/or better regulation. Indeed, this call is about as close as we get to a firm demand from the presently fashionable ‘occupy’ protests.

There are many things wrong with this view. First, the underlying causes of the recent boom and bust could be found, as so often, in monetary disturbances. In comparison to the damage wrought by a deluge of credit, any regulatory deficiencies are just hundreds and thousands atop a cake that was always going to turn out pretty sour.

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The European Union would have Pericles turning in his grave

Lo, all their pomp and circumstance...

“We have a form of government not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states - nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us - which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few but to the multitude, is called a democracy”

Pericles spoke those words in 430 BC, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In his famous funeral oration he commemorated the men of Athens who had died defending their democracy from the military dictatorship of Sparta, and reaffirmed what they had died for.

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Clerically clueless - The Church and the protestors

It is difficult to understand quite what protestors expected to happen when they tried to ‘occupy’ the London Stock Exchange a couple of weeks ago. Firstly, it’s a pretty well used building already so is in little need of further ‘occupation’. Secondly, it’s a privately owned building. Even Britain’s supine Police force was unlikely to allow a well advertised act of breaking and entering to take place.

So the protest was rather silly from the off. But as they kicked their heels outside the stock exchange the protestors knew enough to know that they would get a warm welcome from the Church of England, an institution which has become rather silly itself.

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