Financial Regulations.

Economics Economics Questions
1

Is there an online resource available that lists US regulations, especially financial ones?

A friend of mine is reading The Big Short, and he claimed (either from that book or from another source) that the bond market was completely deregulated prior to the financial crisis; I asserted that all financial markets are regulated and have been for all of recent history, but–as of yet–I’ve had only my hunch to back up my rebuttal (I simply can’t fathom any financial market being “deregulated”).

Thanks, in advance, for any help!

2

I would be very surprised if there were a comprehensive list anywhere. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but the best thing you can do is to cherry pick particularly bad regulations, the same way theleft cherry picks "deregulations

3

You can’t isolate a market like that as if it operated in isolation. Bonds or whatever can be completely not regulated but regulated financial institutions are buying and selling them. Even the Federal Reserve can buy or sell them. I don’t know what point your friend was trying to make, but it can probably be shown to be fallacious even granted that some bond market is not regulated.

4

It’s funny you should ask; I was just looking into this. I don’t know of a comprehensive list of specific regulations but I made a list of agencies in the U.S. which have financial regulatory functions:

And a wikipedia article about U.S. bank regulation: Bank regulation in the United States
Amusingly the first sentence of the second paragraph begins with “The U.S also has one of the most highly regulated banking environments in the world”

Also the Mises daily Never-Ending Government Lies About Markets by Thomas J. DiLorenzo has a list of regulatory functions of the Federal Reserve:

  • Bank holding companies
  • State-chartered banks
  • Foreign branches of member banks
  • Edge and agreement corporations
  • US state-licensed branches, agencies, and representative offices of foreign banks
  • Nonbanking activities of foreign banks
  • National banks (with the Comptroller of the Currency)
  • Savings banks (with the Office of Thrift Supervision)
  • Nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies
  • Thrift holding companies
  • Financial reporting
  • Accounting policies of banks
  • Business “continuity” in case of an economic emergency
  • Consumer-protection laws
  • Securities dealings of banks
  • Information technology used by banks
  • Foreign investments of banks
  • Foreign lending by banks
  • Branch banking
  • Bank mergers and acquisitions
  • Who may own a bank
  • Capital “adequacy standards”
  • Extensions of credit for the purchase of securities
  • Equal-opportunity lending
  • Mortgage disclosure information
  • Reserve requirements
  • Electronic-funds transfers
  • Interbank liabilities
  • Community Reinvestment Act subprime lending requirements
  • All international banking operations
  • Consumer leasing
  • Privacy of consumer financial information
  • Payments on demand deposits
  • “Fair credit” reporting
  • Transactions between member banks and their affiliates
  • Truth in lending
  • Truth in savings

Hopefully that’s a good start.

5

The Department of Justice website is about the sum of it. However, I recall Hoppe or someone citing the number of pages of regulations at two points in time. Needless to say it was dramatically higher at the later time.

6

PIMCO actually assassinates heads of state. That’s how deregulated the bond market is.

Clayton -