Ben Bernanke on the future of bank regulation.

there is some evidence that capital standards, accounting rules, and other regulations have made the financial sector excessively procyclical–that is, they lead financial institutions to ease credit in booms and tighten credit in downturns more than is justified by changes in the creditworthiness of borrowers, thereby intensifying cyclical changes.

I will have more to say about this and related issues soon.

Jeff Jarvis on restructuring.

entire swaths and even sectors of the economy will disappear or will change so much they might as well disappear:

This is one of my current themes. Again, I think of David Halberstam’s book The Fifties, and how a very different economy emerged. The Great Depression got rid of a lot of farms and a lot of urban manufacturing work. What emerged twenty years later was a suburban economy, with a lot of businesses based in shopping malls.In some sense, the period from 1930-1955 completed the transition brought about by the automobile and the electric motor. Now, we may be in the painful process of completing the transition brought about by Internet communications.