Regulate this!

Alan Blinder in today's NY Times points out that the financial regulation we are likely to get is not the financial regulation that we might actually need. That is to say he expects that there will be additional consumer protection and pay limitations forthcoming (which he deems to be of second order importance), while things of first order importance like making derivative markets more transparent or creating new rules to deal with the potential failure of large financial firms may go unaddressed.

Well worth reading.

I am going to lose some of Mungo's libertarian street cred here, but I think that increasing the transparency of, and collateral behind, derivatives is a very good idea. I am not a fan of legislating pay limits or having a government panel set them.