7 thoughts on “What Was “Deregulated”?”

  1. Government guarantees, both implicit and explicit are one big part of the problem. Having a central bank that effectively prints money is another. Legislation that requires banks to lend to people that aren’t creditworthy doesn’t help either. Anyone who calls that a failure of deregulation is either ignorant or a liar. Or both.

  2. It wasn’t so much that the legislation “required” them to do so as pressure from ACORN, Operation PUSH, and similar groups (aided and abetted by the government), who would mau mau the banks if they didn’t lend to the designated “victims.”

  3. Didn’t Clinton pretty much threaten them with closer scrutiny from regulators if they didn’t lend more money?

  4. Capitalism can lead to monopolies in some situations (like evolution and mono cultures), and where it does governments are currently required to regulate competition – to enforce anti trust laws.

    A private monopoly is effectively government (typically unelected), having the power to tax and regulate. One can at least unelect a democratic socialist government, the general population can not unelect a private monopoly. However, open competition generally brings about greater performance – if a competitive private sector can do the job, let it do it…

    The tendency of governments to privatize industries by simply creating private monopolies gave deregulation a bad name, though I would define this more as outsourced unelected re-regulation.

    Granting private companies monopolies through guarantees leads to privatized monopolies, if a monopoly is actually required, then its leaders need to be directly elected and accountable to the public at large.

    “To big to fail” says there is a monopoly, and infers a government failure to enforce anti trust laws, or, a government department.

  5. Capitalism can lead to monopolies in some situations

    Monopolies are only sustainable when the government interferes with the market.

  6. Monopolies are only sustainable when the government interferes with the market.

    Unfortunately governments are monopolies, so there is not much getting around this.

    Mono cultures do exist and can be sustainable in both the natural and unnatural worlds. For example, cartels do transcend governmental boundaries and require active governmental interference to prevent.

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