Obama’s reform: Systemic danger once again

[efoods]Transactions in securities “are affected with a national public interest which makes it necessary to provide for regulation and control… and to impose requirements necessary to make such regulation and control reasonably complete and effective… in order to… insure the maintenance of fair and honest markets”. The text explains how such intervention is required to face “[n]ational emergencies, which produce widespread unemployment and dislocation of trade… and adversely affect the general welfare”.

Last week, U.S. president Barak Obama presented his plan for financial regulatory reform, but the quotes above are not taken from there. Instead, they come from section 2 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Seventy-five years later, Obama appears to have a similar approach in proposing (and here I quote Obama) “a set of reforms that require regulators to look not only at the safety and soundness of individual institutions, but also — for the first time — at the stability of the financial system as a whole”.

This is not the first time a systemic regulatory reform is introduced, we have gone through this before.

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This article was posted: Friday, June 26, 2009 at 12:25 pm

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