That’s the basic model, and we’ll see it again and again. The government constrains bankers through regulation to limit the amount of damage they can do to the economy. Those regulations also reduce the profit bankers can make, so they chafe against them. They hack those regulations with tricks that the regulators didn’t anticipate and didn’t specifically prohibit and build profitable businesses around them. Then they do whatever they can to influence regulators—and government itself—not to patch the regulations, but instead to permit and normalize their hacks. A side effect is expensive
...more
