Regulatory Reform: About Freakin' Time

By Matt -- One year after last fall's meltdown of the U.S. and global financial markets, the leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies are meeting to discuss long overdue regulatory changes. We should be cheering, and some of us are, because we don't want to go again down the merry path my conservative friends have held us to since the 1980s. Time and again over the last three decades, their laissez-faire faith in the free market's wisdom and ethics have led us to the brink of disaster. Sensible regulation will lead us back.
The G-20 leaders are considering moves that just make sense: 1) to sustain and then wind down the stimulus packages that, regrettably, governments must implement when economies falter. 2) to implement new bank capital rules and, finally, 3) to rein in financial industry excesses. While we can't expect to see outright limits on executive pay, as some European nations have argued, we ought to, considering the damage that these high-rollers have done.
Let's not forget, as time passes, just how close we were to real disaster. Titans of Wall Street were falling like dominoes, financial markets froze and the Dow plummeted. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were disappearing every month. It really looked like the end of capitalism as we know it. And it was.
For too long, conservative ideologues have ruled the roost in the White House and in the Washington think-tanks which pull the strings behind our political parties. These people got what they wanted: Deregulation, a loosening of restrictions on financial markets and banking activity, runaway executive pay and ever-lower taxes for the richest Americans. These were the thinkers in the driver's seat when the car went over the cliff. Now that we've had to pay to haul the thing out of the ditch and put it back on the road, we don't just want a new driver. We want the previous driver admit that he was wrong, or drunk.
We will be setting new rules of the road that may keep these folks from driving so fast and recklessly in the future, as well we should. Let's hope the cops are watching the road more closely from now on. And with that, I will yield this belabored analogy.