Fighting the Wrong Fight on Financial Reform
Here are Hernando de Soto’s criteria for effective reform of derivatives regulation:
- All documents and the assets and transactions they represent or are derived from must be recorded in publicly accessible registries. It is only by recording and continually updating such factual knowledge that we can detect the kind of overly creative financial and contractual instruments that plunged us into this recession.
- The law has to take into account the "externalities" or side effects of all financial transactions according to the legal principle of erga omnes ("toward all"), which was originally developed to protect third parties from the negative consequences of secret deals carried out by aristocracies accountable to no one but themselves.
- Every financial deal must be firmly tethered to the real performance of the asset from which it originated. By aligning debts to assets, we can create simple and understandable benchmarks for quickly detecting whether a financial transaction has been created to help production or to bet on the performance of distant "underlying assets."
- Governments should never forget that production always takes priority over finance. As Adam Smith and Karl Marx both recognized, finance supports wealth creation, but in itself creates no value.
- Governments can encourage assets to be leveraged, transformed, combined, recombined and repackaged into any number of tranches, provided the process intends to improve the value of the original asset. This has been the rule for awarding property since the beginning of time.
- Governments can no longer tolerate the use of opaque and confusing language in drafting financial instruments. Clarity and precision are indispensable for the creation of credit and capital through paper. Western politicians must not forget what their greatest thinkers have been saying for centuries: All obligations and commitments that stick are derived from words recorded on paper with great precision.
Above all, governments should stop clinging to the hope that the existing market will eventually sort things out. "Let the market do its work" has come to mean, "let the shadow economy do its work." But modern markets only work if the paper is reliable.
These ideas from one of our greatest free-market thinkers more or less align with the section of the financial reform bill that deals with derivatives.
That does not mean that the bill is fine. Democrats have tethered derivatives regulation to another project, the creation of a new agency to regulate and protect consumer credit. That's a seriously bad idea that will tend to constrict the flow of credit to households and small businesses. Yet it's the new consumer-protection agency that seems to be the least controversial element of the Democrats' proposal. Meanwhile it's the elements of the bill that address Hernando's concerns that are the most controversial with Republicans and the right. Curious, huh.