Den finansiella krisen illustrerar, anser många, att marknadsekonomins aktörer lätt gör fel när det gäller att ta risker. Det må så vara, men erbjuder nya regleringar hopp om färre misstag framöver? Jeffrey Friedman och Wladimir Kraus förhåller sig tveksamma till det:

One lesson of the financial crisis, then, is that regulators, like bankers, are human. Nobody can flawlessly predict the future, but regulators—like bankers and other businesspeople—have no choice but to try.

There is a difference, however. Competing businesses may pursue a variety of strategies based on divergent risk/reward assessments. … By behaving heterogeneously in order to compete with each other, capitalists spread society’s bets among a variety of ideas about the location of risk and reward.

Capitalists as a group aren’t smarter or better at predicting the future than regulators are, and when capitalists fall victim to the herd mentality, they may homogeneously converge on a mistaken prediction. This is a danger, but regulations aggravate it. Of necessity, a regulation homogenizes capitalists’ behavior. Prudential bank regulation, for instance, imposes one idea about risk on the whole banking system, skewing the various risk/reward calculations of all bankers in a direction the regulators deem safe. If the regulators turn out to be mistaken, as they were in 2001, they put the whole system at risk.

Tänkvärt.