In the Huffington Post, Marcus Baram warns against those who claim to be concerned about over-regulation on Wall Street and in the consumer protection sphere. Baram writes:
Today, Wall Street is again on the attack against a regulatory overhaul that includes more stringent investor and consumer protections. Though the financial landscape is far different and the details of the proposals have changed since 1912, the industry is using much of the same alarmist rhetoric to oppose new regulations and rules.
JPMorgan chairman Jamie Dimon recently complained that proposed rules on derivatives, capital buffers and too-big-to-fail banks are bad for America. Wall Street could lose customers to European banks, he said.
Baram includes economist, and my co-author, David S. Evans in his list of those “crying wolf” over over-regulation:
At a congressional hearing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, banking consultant David S. Evans attacked the “hard paternalism” of its interim director Elizabeth Warren. He cautioned that the bureau “could make it harder and more expensive for consumers to borrow money.”
Such Cassandra-like warnings are common in the history of financial regulation.
I think Baram might want to have this one back if given the chance. His point is that the Dimon and David Evans and others are concerned about imposing an enormous regulatory burden are wrong. Of course, I am no scholar of Greek mythology, but I seem to recall that Cassandra was right! Her curse was that nobody believed her accurate predictions about the future. Baram may have stumbled upon something here.
But more seriously, at a time when the unemployment rate is over 9%, when the intellectual architects of the CFPB were quite frank about favoring a regulatory approach that would restrict access to consumer credit (see here), and when the flow of credit is critical to economic growth and recovery, one has to be pretty deeply committed to the cause to so brazenly ignore predictions that massive regulatory structure just might hold the economy back.
Evans’ testimony at the House Hearing on the CFPB is available here.