Reinventing Financial Regulation: A Blueprint for Overcoming Systemic Risk

CHAPTER 7

Protecting Consumers

My principal objective in writing this book has been to correct a fallacy of composition, namely that the current regulatory route has made individual firms safe but in so doing has actually increased the whole financial system’s fragility. Casualties among ordinary consumers in a systemic crash are high. If we can make the system safer, this should give them greater protection. Often, proposals presented as making the system safer are really about better consumer protection. Examples of these include measures that encourage or ban certain instruments, the choice of discouraging bad behavior through either civil or criminal law, and the rearrangement of regulatory institutions. I address these questions over the ...