Last week was the occasion of my first visit ever to Hillsdale College. Wow, was that impressive: it’s sheer bliss to encounter a horde of confident, smart, and serious kids. The reason for my visit was a big campus event on Dodd-Frank; I was one of the invited speakers. The tape is here. It’s based on a manuscript I’m still noodling over. Here’s the gist of it: Conservative-libertarians mope about Dodd-Frank’s subsidies to big financial institutions. They also mope about the feds’ civil and criminal prosecutions of financial institutions—like, J.P. Morgan. My view is that these things are of a piece. As…
Regulatory Decadence and Dodd-Frank
Enacted swiftly in the wake of the financial crisis, the 2,319 pages of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform legislation contain a thicket of rules overhauling the entire American financial system, creating a bevy of new regulatory entities. But that is only the tip of the iceberg—for even then, this does not include the thousands of rule-makings, studies, and enforcement actions that will be triggered by Dodd-Frank, nor does it consider all of the international implications of the legislation. Those looking for a roadmap that lays out the basic ideas that animate Dodd-Frank and its key provisions should turn to David Skeel’s book,…
Friday Roundup, September 28th
Garett Jones at Econ Log matches unemployment benefits with a timeless beer song: 99 weeks of unemployment benefits on the wall, you take one down, spread it around, and it raises unemployment by how much? Ted Frank directs our attention to the lengths the Justice Department will go to in order to defend the use of disparate impact theory as a tool in civil-rights litigation. When States Go Broke: a new faculty book podcast by the Federalist Society featuring David Skeel and Richard Hynes. See also the book of the same title edited by Skeel and Peter Conti-Brown. It's good to live in…
What Rule of Law?
The redoubtable David Skeel had an op-ed in yesterdaty’s Wall Street Journal: “A Nation Adrift From the Rule of Law.” It’s a bone-chilling must-read. Along the way, amidst horror stories of extra-legal bailouts and prosecutions, Skeel takes issue with the Eric Posner/Adrian Vermeule postmodernism-for-conservatives riff, which says that the rule of law is never worth a dang in a crisis and so why worry. Putting aside that “pushing the envelope isn’t the same thing as flouting the law,” one has to fear to crisis-induced lawlessness become the new normal. In support of this proposition, Skeel cites the Dodd-Frank Act. Hard to…
