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Financial regulations aren’t always helpful.
Another word you’ll hear a lot when people talk 
about the financial crisis is “regulations.” And 
contrary to what some might say, there were a 
lot of regulations in place when everything came 
crashing down – some of which date back to the 
infamous crash of 1929 and the Great 
Depression that came immediately after.
But this is another important lesson that we 
should take from the 2008 crisis: sometimes 
regulations do more harm than good.
When we pile on one regulation after another, it 
becomes more difficult to implement effective 
policy oversight. More often than not, these 
excessive rules will merely encourage people to 
find new and creative ways of working around 
them, eventually making matters worse.
This is what happened with Regulation Q, which 
set a maximum interest rate on bank deposits, 
such as those in a savings account.
Regulation Q worked until the mid-1980s, when 
US banks began bypassing the regulation by 
depositing their money into European banks that 
weren’t beholden to the regulation, and then 
transferring the money back to the United 
States.
So, rather than discouraging bad business 
practices, as the regulatory agency had hoped, it 
just created more work for the authorities.
One potential solution would be to create a set 
of international regulations, which is the primary 
topic of discussion at G8 and G20 summit 
meetings – but these meetings have yet to be 
very productive.
Another troubling reality of regulations is that 
they make finance extremely complicated, which 
generally benefits the institutions more than their 
customers.
Added regulations can make it harder for the 
average customer to understand even basic 
transactions. And when we become dependent 
on supposed experts or specialists in a field, we 
become far more vulnerable to being taken 
advantage of.
The Securities and Exchange Commission 
(SEC) is in charge of enforcing financial 
regulations in the United States, and their aim is 
to make the system as transparent as possible.
However, the average person will never know 
what’s really going on with their money if the 
information available to them is so full of jargon 
that it might as well be in a different language.
And as long as outsiders are kept in the dark, it 
will to continue to be business as usual for the 
financial sector.

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