It was an honor to have Jim Van Horne present and lead Tuesday’s discussion on Tuesday evening. With impressive credentials and experience in academia, government and business, Jim lead us through the last sixteen speculative bubbles and their aftermath. Holland’s tulip bulb speculation was demonstrated to be only a bit more fantastic than our current easy-money, Fannie-Freddie explosion. His point was that our current pop wasn’t the first, nor the worst, nor unfortunately, will it be the last!
A point that I hadn’t yet pondered was that the multiplicity of financial regulatory agencies needs to be consolidated. This has not been expounded upon in current discussions. Jim said that the current internecine, bureaucratic competition among the multiple agencies with different and often cross purposes was often self defeating. It’s a truism that bureaucracies can only grow, amass power and expend money regardless of the initial or continuing necessity of their missions. This should be stopped. No surprise that no politician is proposing any such curtailment or consolidation. Obama as you may suspect is proposing and additional regulator, a consumer protection agency to mandate vanilla financial instruments!
The lively questions and discussion that followed was what we enjoy in our group. With varied backgrounds we get different perspectives, the sum of which contribute to what some may call a “learning experience!” In that regard it was enlightening to have Tom Cargill and Jerry O’Driscoll participate. With the level of Ph. D. intellects in the room, even this poor attorney felt humble–not an easy feat!
On behalf of the Reno Hayek Symposium, I want to thank Jim for a wonderful and enlightening evening. He has a standing invitation to our dinner discussion whenever his travels take him to Reno on the third Tuesday of the month.
Tom Motherway