Regulation Is What We Need

I attended a symposium on the credit crisis yesterday up at City College and couldn't help but laugh. The "experts" were well versed in what they knew but there was really nothing new coming from them. Hedge funder Jonathon Trugman's idea to eliminate taxes on certain financial products typified the conservative idea that we can tax-cut our way out of this mess when it was tax cuts (and laissez-faire capitalism) that helped cause the problem. What we really need is re-regulation, something that Obama and Geithner show signs of understanding.

From RawStory:

"In the coming weeks, we will take additional steps, among them, proposing new and stronger rules to protect American consumers and investors against financial fraud and abuse," Geithner said.

"These will help us deal in the future with threats like the practices in subprime lending that kicked off the current crisis," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in a New York speech.

Geithner said that the plan would not focus solely on financial regulations in the United States, "but -- with the help of other interested nations and strengthened international bodies -- on stronger standards globally, as well."

Geithner will accompany US President Barack Obama to the Group of 20 summit of developed and developing nations in London on April 2 aimed at devising a global system to ensure recovery and making financial reforms.

In our highly connected world, we do need to devise a plan that not only deals with American-bred greed and corruption but international forms of it as well. Using ideas of the past should not be a part of the equation that could possibly be developed at the G20. People like Trugman and those with ideas like his need to buried and regulations that were successfully utilized in the past need to be revamped for our 21st century world.