Banking Regulation and the Tour de France
I was thinking a couple of weeks ago about the whole banking crisis, and the older opinions from the White House that industry would be self-regulating.
Well, yeah, I guess it is. But it reminded me of the problems they’ve had with professional cycling, and the Tour de France.
You see, they started using amphetamines in cycling way back when. One guy died on a big climb when his heart exploded (I exaggerate, but not by much). Finally, they started testing for substances, at which point the evil doers invented new substances. Which required more tests, which led to more invention.
And look at the professional wrestling industry on TV. That’s apparently pretty unregulated, guys are dying from all sorts of weird cancers, brain tumors, and look pretty much inhuman after many years. Same thing happened in pro football.
The parallels? Well, certain banks invented new security vehicles (new drugs). It leads to over-leveraged operations (cardiac stress), which causes bankruptcy (death). Will the financial industry self-regulate? Only partially at best, I’m convinced. There will always be some that don’t take a long term view, or to whom "winning" is more important than the risk. (Yes, I’m slamming capitalism). If we are okay with the risk of our athletes occasionally dying of strange cancers, or our banks occasionally just going belly up and taking everyone down with them (another parallel: you ever see one of the bad crashes when the pack is sprinting for the finish line in a bike race? Suddenly, 20, 30 guys can be down, writhing in pain. Yeah, it’s what we watch for. Financially, that’s exactly what we’re in the middle of right now.
So, if you believe that athletes shouldn’t be taking performance enhancing drugs, and that they need to be tested to stop them from doing that, then I think it follows that we should have regulation in the financial industry to prevent such garbage crap as has sent us all down the toy-toy.
Self regulation always would be much too little, and much much too late.
and you can’t do it just once, you have to stay on them all the time, cause everyone is always trying to find the next big loophole.
it all boils down to people are greedy a ruthless if they are not given boundaries and limits. it does no good to put limits and boundaries in place if you aren’t even going to enforce them, except for those who aren’t your friends, and allow the rest to run ramparted to do whatever they want. we had checks and balances, limits and boundaries and instead JR and his cronies thought there was noreason for them. and thx to them eroding what was otherwise a working system, we now can blame them for the dirty freaking crooks they are. i say we make JR pay back the difference. funny how most of the people at the tops of these failed finical companies are also people who have been buddy buddy with the bush’s for a loooooong time. oh but wait!! that would be holding someone accountable, and we all know that us americans can no longer be held accountable for our actions. the rules apply to everyone else, not us after all. *rolls eyes*
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Agreed.
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deregulate (in my ignorant opinion) is the problem… self regulate? Only if THEY are able to hide reality from the public…
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