'The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play'—The Insanity of the Regulatory Race to the Bottom'

[KoKo]

Published on Sunday, April 22, 2012 by New Economic Perspectives
'The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play'—The Insanity of the Regulatory Race to the Bottom
by William K. Black

The plot of the movie WarGames (1983) involves a slacker hacker (played by Matthew Broderick) who starts playing the game “Global Thermonuclear War” with Joshua, a Department of Defense (DoD) supercomputer that has been given partial control by DoD of our nuclear forces. The game prompts Joshua, who has been programmed to win games, to trick DoD into authorizing Joshua to launch an attack on the Soviet Union so that Joshua can win the game. The hacker and the professor that programmed Joshua realize that the only way to prevent Joshua from attacking is to teach “him” that no one can “win” global thermonuclear war. The insanity is that the people who created the game “Global Thermonuclear War” thought it could be won. Joshua races through thousands of scenarios and ends his plan to win the “Global Thermonuclear War” game by attacking the Soviet Union when he realizes that “the only winning move is not to play.”

The JOBS Act is insane on many levels. It creates an extraordinarily criminogenic environment in which securities fraud will become even more out of control. One of the forms of insanity is the belief that one can “win” a regulatory “race to the bottom.” The only winning move is not to play in a regulatory race to the bottom. The primary rationale for the JOBS Act is the claim that we must win a regulatory race to the bottom with the City of London by adopting even weaker protections for investors from securities fraud than does the United Kingdom (UK).

The second form of insanity is that the JOBS Act is being adopted without any consideration of the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), the national commission to investigate the causes of the current crisis. I am not aware of any proponent or opponent of the JOBS Act (other than me) who has cited the findings of FCIC. Everyone involved has ignored the detailed finding of a huge investigative effort. The FCIC report explained repeatedly how the three “de’s” (deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization) had produced the criminogenic environment that drove the financial crisis. The FCIC report specifically condemned the “regulatory arbitrage” that the worst actors exploited by choosing to be (not very) regulated by the “winners” of the regulatory race to the bottom. The FCIC report shows repeatedly how damaging the anti-regulatory fervor in general and the race to the bottom in particular proved.

The third form of insanity is that the JOBS Act was framed without any input from anti-fraud experts. Anti-fraud experts uniformly condemned the bill. We have ignored the experts.

The fourth form of insanity is that we have ignored the people who got past crises correct. The people who were the first to identify prior crises, who designed and implemented successful means to limit the crises, who prevented problems through effective supervision from becoming crises, and who held the most elite fraudulent CEOs culpable for their frauds have all been excluded from the drafting of the JOBS Act.


Much More than the snips I could give at......

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/22-4

[bbgrunt]

1. BJG k and r

[bvar22]

2. DURec. Strongly recommend that everybody read the linked article.

Goes all the way UP to TEN levels of insanity,
and I think he missed a few.

#9 was a good one.

"The ninth form of insanity is that the JOBS Act is being adopted at the same time that the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – the most anti-regulatory bank in the entire Federal Reserve system (which is a very large statement) warned in its recently released annual report that the largest U.S. banks drove the ongoing crisis and posed “a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy.”

WOW.


I gave up hope for any real change in 2009 when I saw the Cabinet appointments and team of Economic Experts
that were supposed to guide us out of the crisis.
They were/are the same people that caused it and benefited from the "crisis".


You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.
[font size=5 color=green]Solidarity99![/font][font size=2 color=green]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]

[KoKo]

3. #9...Definitely...Thanks for pointing that one out. n/t