Morning Bell: Don’t Enable The Financial-Regulatory Complex
Conn Carroll /
This Saturday, tens of thousands of Americans marched on Washington to protest the unprecedented amount of power being concentrated in Washington, DC under the Obama administration. And even the New York Times admits they have a point: “The government is the nation’s biggest lender, insurer, automaker and guarantor against risk for investors large and small. Between financial rescue missions and the economic stimulus program, government spending accounts for a bigger share of the nation’s economy — 26 percent — than at any time since World War II.”
And on the Sunday New York Times op-ed page, George Mason University professor of economics Tyler Cowen writes:
For years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating. … President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the birth of a military-industrial complex. Today we have a financial-regulatory complex, and it has meant a consolidation of power and privilege. We’ve created a class of politically protected “too big to fail” institutions, and the current proposals for regulatory reform further cement this notion.