When people sound off against "the bureaucracy," most of the time they seem to be talking about little people in little government offices somewhere in Washington or the state capitol. Me? I think of all kinds of jerks, not excluding corporate jerks and -- ta da! -- Congressional jerks. Anywhere there are people who live in tiny cubicles of their own making that shield them from contact with reality.
A great example of this appears in an interview (which I'm typing up for The Scribe) with economist Simon Johnson who is cheerful but, frankly, uniformly pessimistic about where the financial system is headed. Why? Well, read this.
Interviewer: Some are calling for a merger between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Where do you stand on that idea?Simon Johnson: There's no question that we have too many regulators in the US. A lot of our problems are actually the different distinctions and distance between federal regulators and state regulators -- for example, in insurance. This is a huge issue. So I'm in favor of consolidating these regulators as much as possible. And -- what you talked about -- potentially merging the people who regulate securities and the people who regulate [laughs] ... securities -- of course makes sense! That is incredibly difficult to get through because they report to different committees in Congress. Those committees in Congress do not want to give up that jurisdiction.
Nothing new there. Still, the pettiness of a few members of Congress could be at the core of the world's economy continuing to take a series of deep dives over an undetermined period. Something to think about.
