Plus de réglementation, la solution pour prévenir les crises financières?

En fait, comme l'explique Doug French du Mises Institute, les institutions financières les plus impliquées dans la crise financière étaient, en fait, parmi les entreprises les plus régimentées au monde.

Il serait donc extrémement naïf de croire qu'une couche supplémentaire de lois soit la voie du salut:

Of course the constant carping has been that there just hasn't been enough regulation: that crazy laissez-faire Bush administration dismantled all the financial regulation don't you know. The real fact is, even the average Podunk bank operating as a holding company not only has a state regulator, but the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, or the OTS, or the OCC regulating them. Not to mention all the business licensing and whatnot that's required on the local level.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner testified that AIG had

regulators in 20 different states being responsible for the primary regulation and supervision of AIG's U.S. insurance subsidiaries. Despite AIG's foreign insurance activities being regulated by more than 130 foreign governments, and despite AIG's holding company being subject to supervision by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), no one was adequately aware of what was really going on at AIG.

There's been plenty of government regulating, and as regulations grow, the incidences of financial booms and panics grow in step, as Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson chronicle in their wonderful new book Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. Looking back at financial crises, the authors note "the impacts of rampant speculation, government involvement or poor government responses, misguided monetary polices, ill-designed regulation and misunderstood new financial technology, as well as the oft-repeated failure on the part of policy makers and legislators to draw the appropriate lessons from painful experiences" have been constant themes.