(Feb. 27, 2016) Eight years after the financial crisis broke out in the United States, there is as much confusion as ever regarding what reforms are appropriate in order to minimize the recurrence of such crises in the future.
Many questions in the field of financial regulation are hard to answer: Would the separation of commercial banking and investment banking help prevent crises? To what extent should individual consumers be protected against foolishly borrowing too much? Should Credit Default Swaps be regulated out of existence? What should regulators do about patterns of high executive compensation that is evidently not a reward for performance? I have views on these questions, just as other observers do. But in these cases I see the arguments on both sides.