On Radio Free Megan, Austan Goolsbee (now an adviser to Barack Obama) discusses, among other things, the role of regulation in financial markets.
Using his 20/20 hindsight, Goolsbee tells us that the mortgage market should have been better regulated. I do not recall reading any op-eds by Goolsbee in 2005 calling for tighter mortgage market regulation.
To his credit, so to speak, Goolsbee is saying right now that credit card markets need more regulation, because they could end up like the mortgage market. But Megan never asks him to spell this out. Is there fraud in the origination of credit cards, the way there is in mortgages? In credit cards, what is the equivalent to the role played by rising house prices and speculative home purchases in the mortgage market? Are there credit card brokers who operate like mortgage brokers? Are there AAA-rated securities backed by credit card debt that are potentially going to be downgraded?
What regulations, exactly, does Goolsbee think are needed right now in the credit card market? Should the government tell the credit card companies to ration credit? Should it tell credit card companies to accept fewer applications, which means turning down some good borrowers? Does the government know something about credit card origination that the credit card companies don't know, so that the government could make just as many good loans but fewer bad loans? What is this information that the government has?
Maybe if Megan does another interview, she can ask these questions.
Speaking of being disingenous, Robert J. Samuelson writes,
Just why investment bankers and traders out-earn, say, doctors or computer engineers is a question I've never heard convincingly answered. Are they smarter? Unlikely. Do they contribute more to the economy? Questionable.
...Indeed, many Americans may conclude that capitalism has run amok.
Does Samuelson think that we need government regulators to set compensation in the economy? Does he have some suggestions for investment banking firms for ways to structure compensation packages?
Few things can be said with greater confidence than that compensation systems in America are badly flawed. But it is the nature of compensation systems to be flawed. The perfect compensation system has never been developed, nor will it ever be developed.
If you have some ideas about effective compensation schemes, then why don't you become an executive or a consultant to corporate boards?
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