Greenspan’s more serious and longer-running error has been to consistently shrug off the need for regulation and better disclosure with regard to derivative products. Deluded as to the banks’ ability to police themselves before the crisis, Greenspan called for a less burdensome regulatory regime barely six months after it.13 His Neolithic opposition to enhanced disclosure—which, because it allows investors to be their own watchdogs, is ever the best friend of free capital markets—served to remind one of the early Greenspan who (in thrall to Ayn Rand) once wrote, “The basis of regulation is
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