Having a really hard time adjusting out of the past eight years, I’ve discovered, especially when it comes to the appointment of qualified people:
Cass Sunstein, a longtime University of Chicago legal scholar and prominent author, is set to take up a key cause in the Barack Obama administration: regulation.
[ . . . ]
Obama has promised an overhaul to federal regulation, specifically of the U.S. financial markets, and Sunstein’s job description suggests a sweeping agenda.
“This office is in charge of coordinating and overseeing government regulations,” a transition official said Wednesday, “and a smarter approach to regulation is key to making government work better and getting better results in terms of protecting health, the environment, etc.”
Regulatory rulemaking and enforcement is probably one of the least-sexy and most misunderstood functions of our Federal government, yet it provides some of the most tangible benefits (and costs) to citizens. Given that the rulemaking environments vary drastically from agency to agency, it’ll be interesting to see what Sunstein hopes to – and can – accomplish in this post.
tx2vadem
I read through some of Paulson’s proposals. And I read several articles in trade magazines about it. And I liked his idea for consolidating a lot the regulatory bodies to eliminate regulatory overlap and inconsistent regulatory visions. As long as say the SEC and CFTC are separately managed entities, it will be difficult to align their regulatory philosophy.
I mean really you have so many regulators of the financial market. It makes coordination a difficult task. It would be akin to trying to get OPEC countries to not break their quota when the price of oil hits $140 a barrel. I really think a good deal of consolidation needs to occur especially in banking regulation. Federal Reserve, Thrift Supervision, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDIC, SIPC, SEC, and CFTC are just to many people looking at essentially similar things. And the problem with numerous reviews is that you can get into lack of accountability as everyone thinks someone else should be catching a problem.
But I don’t know whether anyone is going to tackle this or not. They are probably just going to add a layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing framework and hope that solves something. I mean Barnie Franks proposal to set rules in the law in what banks need to do in order to originate mortgages is silly to me. The Federal Reserve already has this authority.
MB
I don’t pretend to understand the regulatory patchwork covering the financial industry, but what you’re saying certainly makes sense, TX. However, I do suppose that we’ve got DHS sitting there as an example of the problems that can come with massive consolidation.
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I sort of wonder if the raised profile of this position and the (admittedly gimmicky sounding) “Chief Performance Officer” is a bit of Al Gore’s advice coming to surface. He was on the right track, if you recall his Reinventing Government initiatives.