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Government Has Financial Amnesia and Denial, Too

Scott S. Powell
March 9, 2012
Economics
 Original Article

The success of new laws and regulations is best measured by how they address and fix the core problems they are designed to solve.

By this simple standard, Dodd-Frank is a failure. The regulatory paperwork for banks has nearly tripled, making the processing of loans more difficult, costly and protracted when the economy can least afford it. Banks are still “too big to fail,” and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain wards of the state, having cost taxpayers some $170 billion and counting. Systemic risk has dramatically increased since 2008 with the transfer and growth of debt from the private to the public sector. Thus, perhaps amnesia is a condition more characteristic of Mr. Geithner and Washington than the people at large.

 

Scott S. Powell
Discovery Institute
Seattle

Scott S. Powell

Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth and Poverty
Scott Powell has worked in the corporate, academic, and research worlds. He has taught at two universities, served on two corporate boards, and been an entrepreneur—founding two companies. He has been Senior Fellow at the  Discovery Institute since 2012, after a six-year affiliation with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has written three books and over 350 published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Newsmax, The Federalist ,USA Today, Barron’s Financial, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, and some 50 other newspapers and journals in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He delivered the valedictory address at his graduation from the University of Chicago with honors (B.A. and M.A.) and received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston University.