I keep hearing this argument, 'no oversight', and I have yet to see proof of it. Finance remains the most heavily regulated industry, as it has for decades.
To name two examples from the financial meltdown:
- Lending practices at banks are regulated by the Federal Reserve. Lending practices by mortgage brokers financed by i-banks and hedge funds were essentially unregulated. Those are where a lot of the bad loans and securities started.
- Derivatives are normally regulated by the CFTC, but credit default swaps were specifically exempted from that regulation in 2000, on the assumption that other federal regulators would cover the downstream risks under their purview (they did not).
I'm not trying to be pedantic if you were just speaking in hyperbole, but I'm curious on the methodology for determining that.