Market as Regulator

Regulators
We regulate any stealing of his property
And we damn good too
But you cant be any geek off the street,
Gotta be handy with the steel if you know what I mean, earn your keep!
Regulators!!! mount up!

The epic words of Warren G in many respects seem to sum up our government’s regulatory regime. Guys like Barney and Timmy clearly are “handy with the steel,” in their ability to influence businesses. They also in many respects do regulate stealing, ultimately robbing investors and businessmen in creating moral hazard for the bond and shareholders and all sorts of barriers to entry for the firms.

Yet recently amidst the market fallout there have been calls left and right for some sort of even more powerful “super-regulator.” After all, given that our regulatory architecture seems to have failed us this time, why not create an even bigger and stronger one to prevent the crisis next time?

Just like all government attempts to stop future crises, be it in healthcare or food and drugs, regulation always perpetuates the problems, creating greater ones down the road. In the financial system, we see perhaps the greatest case AGAINST regulation. Let us examine my seemingly counterintuitive claim.

The first and most obvious reason against regulation is that it creates a significant amount of moral hazard. If one has the SEC there to ensure that financial institutions are seemingly playing by the rules, or the FDIC there to ensure that even if a bank is insolvent, one will be able to receive his deposits (up to a point), then this encourages one to take far greater incremental risks than one otherwise would. After all, with the seal of approval of a government institution, why would you ever get your hands dirty in analyzing the institutions in which you entrust your money?

This problem is especially pervasive when it comes to the credit ratings agencies, namely Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, who are designated “Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations” by the SEC. Individual investors and institutional investors alike had become reliant on these agencies to gauge the risk of default of individual companies and securities, only for many of these companies and securities to blow up in their faces during this crisis. Had people actually gone in and done the risk analysis themselves, as opposed to relying on ratings assigned to companies largely by government decree, I would argue that people would have taken far more prudent positions with their capital.

Further, without this pseudo-cartel of agencies, I would imagine there would grow hundreds if not thousands of competing private firms to do independent analysis, greatly benefitting the investor without the time or knowledge to do financial analysis. Sure some of these companies might partake of fraudulent activities themselves, but they would either lose credibility and have to fix up their act to compete, or be prosecuted for the fraud they perpetrated. I admit that in this case, you do need law enforcement when it comes to fraud, but it is far more likely (given all of the times that private companies for example had uncovered the Madoff scheme before the regulators ever did anything) that the authorities would be able to react were market participants able to signal fraud to them. Still, at the very least the consumer would have far more choice in determining which analysis was best.

This brings us to another problem with government regulation – the fact that it is done by government monopoly. Government officials just like businessmen are prone to error. Unlike businessmen however, they lack a profit motive to work efficiently and prudently. To this end, if we see how ineffectual the DMV is, why should the SEC or FDIC or SIPC or any of these other alphabet-soup agencies be any more trusted? Sure, many of the people that work for these agencies previously worked in private industry, but remember that this in itself creates many a conflict of interest. Madoff himself had ties to the SEC, which may have helped him keep his Ponzi scheme alive for so many years.

Government regulators also create problems in that they make costly work for businesses and investors. SARBOX and other forms of compliance cost businesses small and large millions each year, while the regulators’ decisions to allow off-balance-sheet financing in many ways incentivized companies to hide the risks that should have been plain as day to investors. All of this is bad for transparency and efficiency, two things regulators are supposed to encourage.

On the other hand, there is the crazy idea of letting the market serve as the regulator. I would argue that discerning, self-interested investors have the best judgment when it comes to the valuation because they are responsible for their money. For it is the market that assigns a price to securities – riskier ones command a higher risk premium. Companies that make mistakes, be it through poor compensation standards that reward incompetence, poor investment projects, etc will face prohibitive borrowing costs and lower stock prices, and ultimately if the market so chooses be taken under. It is this playing field that ensures regulation. The mercy of the market will hold people accountable. Government regulators, government-empowered ratings agencies and others merely create the moral hazard that stops this system from functioning properly.

When government regulators set a precedent of bailing people out for bad behavior under the guise that a company is “too big to fail,” you further destroy the regulation of the market. You encourage excessive risk-taking; you encourage striving for short-term gains at the cost of long-term sustained profitability. You hurt the investors who are trying to signal through bond and share prices that a firm is in bad shape, and ultimately hurt taxpayers if you make the private problems of some investors into the public problems of all Americans. To let bureaucrats go in and say that a company is stable, often disingenuously, as opposed to letting investors speak with their money is as arbitrary as it is abominable.

The fact of the matter is that government doesn’t want to let the market work as it did in blowing up companies with worthless assets (even if it was the moral hazard built into system and intervention that caused creation and investment in these assets), because it will hurt the interests that prop the elected officials up, destroy their own wealth, undermine their power (wouldn’t want to waste a crisis) and further cause unrest amongst the populace.

But the short-term dislocation versus the long-run fiscal and moral decay of the country is incomparable. The former will lead to an economy and a nation made stronger; the ladder to tyranny. The problem in our nation is that if you are a politician and trying to get reelected, you make this calculation and hope that things don’t collapse at the wrong time, namely under your watch. Interestingly, this sacrifice of long-term sustainability for short-term gain is just the calculation made by many at the banks who played with essentially free house money (courtesy of the Fed), leading us to the crisis today. But let these same government officials who in large part mucked things up the first time around gain even greater control over the economy. I dare you.