Self-recommending, as Tyler would say. The lawyer-blogger at Capitalism without Failure comments,
Prof. Johnson says he is a follower of George Stigler, who made the point that when you regulate industry, industry will attempt to capture the regulators. Bankers are able to capture the regulation and get themselves huge commissions to take on risk. We witnessed one of the most sophisticated episodes of regulatory capture in the history of humankind.
When the Fed’s defenders champion its independence, what they mean is independence from democratic institutions. It turns out not to be so independent of the large banks.
In most of the world, government and banking tend to be highly entangled. I read Niall Ferguson as saying that this entanglement historically came about because governments were financing wars. One of the dubious achievements of the Progressive movement was convincing Americans that such entanglement is necessary in a modern economy that did not need to finance wars.
READER COMMENTS
GU
Nov 30 2011 at 12:13pm
Economists really have a thing about lawyers.
Arnold Kling
Nov 30 2011 at 12:50pm
I didn’t mean anything by “lawyer-blogger.” I would have used his or her name if it were listed, but lacking that information, I needed some sort of identifying tag.
Nathan Smith
Nov 30 2011 at 1:02pm
You sound like a member of Occupy Wall Street in this post.
Jaime
Dec 1 2011 at 12:02am
My name is Jaime Levine. I have not put my name on the website… so “lawyer-blogger” is fine.
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