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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

I think this take ignores the history. After the Great Depression, a number of laws were put in place, in particular the Glass-Steagall act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Legislat... ) that led to 50 years of relative financial stability. In the 80s and 90s these laws were dismantled, leading as you point out to a series of bubbles.

The point is that we have data: we know what happened with regulation, and with less regulation, and with less regulation things were worse. Suggesting that the solution is to remove even more regulation seems a very strange conclusion to draw from this experience.

(As an aside, I'm not sure why bitcoin bubbles being "short" is helpful. What is the advantage of high volatility?)

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> After the Great Depression, a number of laws were put in place, in particular the Glass-Steagall act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Legislat.... ) that led to 50 years of relative financial stability.

That's a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.

There's definitely a chance of that, but I think the repeal of those laws then being immediately followed by a return to damaging volatility is indicative that it was more than just coincidence.

Your assumption is that the crash was caused by the repeal. Another possibility is that the infrastructure and power structure was rotten and over leveraged anyway and the repeal catalyzed the process, because the gsa merely served to conceal the mendacity of the banking industry.

So you're saying the system was greedy and corrupt, that the laws prevented those features from getting out of control, and when we took the laws away they ran wild... therefore we should take the laws away?

no, the system was greedy and corrupt, and the collapse gave us a chance to sweep away the greedy and corrupt parts and increase public skepticism in the system. The laws hid that and gave cover to the continued theft of the general public; and with the bailout, we not only failed to sweep away the bad actors but kept them in place so that they may continue to leech off us. As we continue to blame the loss of the laws for the corruption, we lose sight of the true problem, that the state stacks the deck against us, because now we 'rest in the comfort' that if the state were there, it would have 'saved us', when it's part and parcel of screwing us, all along.

If the two options available are 'post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy' and 'more catastrophic financial crises', I'll take the fallacy, thanks.

It would be a fallacy if the only connection between the events were timing with no reason to suspect a causative link. Claiming that talking movies caused the Great Depression would be an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The Great Depression was caused by a 40% reduction in the money supply following a decade of easy money fed policies (the "roaring 20s"). It is no coincidence that shortly after the federal reserve was created we had the biggest bubble/crash in American financial history.

In any case, regulation is force. What if some people want to take on greater risk (as you see it) and engage in unstable speculative investment? They should have that right.

Long bubbles are bad because usually they are prolonged by government pumping assets to the rich to cushion their fall under the pretext of stability before letting the carpet out from under the unconnected.

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