April 03, 2008

Regulatory outsourcing creates confusion

Sir George Soros in “The false belief at the heart of the financial turmoil”, April 3 though he sees some trees that the regulator’s do not, he completely misses the forest just the same.

Soros accuses the regulators of beeing misguided by a market fundamentalism arguing that they believe markets are self-correcting without being able to grasp that the markets are indeed self correcting, though in a quite violent way grant you, to what should be considered the mother of all regulatory fundamentalisms, the excessive empowerment of the credit rating agencies.

If the credit rating agents had been working for a government institution all hell would have broken out, long ago, but since they work for private companies, they get confused with being a part of the market. Indeed regulatory outsourcing creates confusion.