Among last week’s news items that had colleagues asking me, “What’s your answer to this?,” was a piece by Quartz’s John Detrixhe, telling its readers that, according to “300 years of financial history,” rolling back bank regulations is a good way to trigger a financial meltdown.
Though you may be surprised to hear me say it, there’s some truth to Mr. Detrixhe’s thesis. While government intervention in banking typically does more harm than good, it’s also true that, unless it’s done carefully, deregulation can itself lead to trouble. As I put it some years ago in a Cato Journal article (reprinted recently in Money: Free and Unfree), “Dismantling bad bank regulations is like cutting wires in a time bomb: the job is risky and has to be done in carefully ordered steps, but it beats letting the thing go on ticking.”
Back in the 1980s, for example, when U.S. bank regulators phased-out depression-era regulation‑Q type restrictions on the interest rates depository institutions could pay to their depositors, they unwittingly freed a moral hazard genie that those regulations had kept bottled-up for several decades.