The booming business of Regulation...

[il Padrino Ute]

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...taffing-Up.htm

Thoughts?

[Uncle Ted]

Someone has to keep the SEC employees from watching too much porn.

"Regulators, mount up!"

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Of course, who is going regulate the regulators?

[Katy Lied]

It's my personal opinion that much of the regulation is generated by the market participants themselves, in order to stifle competition.

Get a bunch of (any profession) together, and the first thing they want to do is implement licensing and certification requirements.

Lots of existing mining and extracting companies want to regulate their industry to improve the environment and coincidentally erect barriers to new competition.

The Banking industry is regulated in cycles. When the financial industry crashes and no one trusts them anymore (like after the Great Depression), they beg the Feds to come in and protect them and offer safety nets and guarantees. Until the braver edges of the industry innovate new financial instruments that make a load of cash, then the banking industry throws off years of regulation, and goes crazy in an orgy of banking excess and risk (think 1970s). Then when the industry crashes and contracts, bankers go begging for regulation again.

Obama is operating in an environment where industry wants the backing and guarantees of regulation (and the money that the govt gives them in return for agreeing to regulation). The market is letting Obama do this.

I think the stock market is in for a new long term (like, 10 years) ramp up.

[SCcoug]

Someone has to keep the SEC employees from watching too much porn.

"Regulators, mount up!"

When I hear this I think of this.

[YOUTUBE]1plPyJdXKIY[/YOUTUBE]

[wally]

This was to be expected. The pendulum swings and this is the direction it swung with the most recent supermajority.

I am mostly familiar with EPA and delegated state environmental authorities.

My general observation of EPA and environmental regulators is that they will always ratchet down more tightly on enforcement and rulemaking unless you limit funding and/or change executive leadership. EPA should be impartially playing only the role of enforcement and leave the activism/advocating for the special interest groups. But in general most of people that want to go into environmental science and engineering fields are activist minded. As such this is the type that ends up working for the EPA, former activists who are now capable of muting their opinions to some extent to appear impartial.

This is why I believe that the EPA is hard-wired to grow itself and enforce, and oftentimes wastefully so. For example, it used to be that to begin regulating a pollutant, you had to assess and quantify the sources, demonstrate the fate of that pollutant, and also demonstrate that the beneficial use of that resource (air, water, etc.) to be impaired. But, now I am seeing more and more lazy/incomplete science used. Reference site sort of stuff, like taking an untouched, pristine resource and comparing it to a populated area to determine what the resource in the populated area should look like. Well, you can't compare the two that way, because the only way to truly get them to match up is by depopulating the area. Not only skipping the actual science and faulty logic, but rarely do different natural systems match up that well.

And even with supposedly more money in the regulatory coffers, instead of spending it on more studies by legitimate PhDs at Universities, it is my opinion that they are using it to staff-up.

You asked for thoughts, and this is my stream of consciousness that flowed from that request.

[il Padrino Ute]

This was to be expected. The pendulum swings and this is the direction it swung with the most recent supermajority.

I am mostly familiar with EPA and delegated state environmental authorities.

My general observation of EPA and environmental regulators is that they will always ratchet down more tightly on enforcement and rulemaking unless you limit funding and/or change executive leadership. EPA should be impartially playing only the role of enforcement and leave the activism/advocating for the special interest groups. But in general most of people that want to go into environmental science and engineering fields are activist minded. As such this is the type that ends up working for the EPA, former activists who are now capable of muting their opinions to some extent to appear impartial.

This is why I believe that the EPA is hard-wired to grow itself and enforce, and oftentimes wastefully so. For example, it used to be that to begin regulating a pollutant, you had to assess and quantify the sources, demonstrate the fate of that pollutant, and also demonstrate that the beneficial use of that resource (air, water, etc.) to be impaired. But, now I am seeing more and more lazy/incomplete science used. Reference site sort of stuff, like taking an untouched, pristine resource and comparing it to a populated area to determine what the resource in the populated area should look like. Well, you can't compare the two that way, because the only way to truly get them to match up is by depopulating the area. Not only skipping the actual science and faulty logic, but rarely do different natural systems match up that well.

And even with supposedly more money in the regulatory coffers, instead of spending it on more studies by legitimate PhDs at Universities, it is my opinion that they are using it to staff-up.

You asked for thoughts, and this is my stream of consciousness that flowed from that request.

I appreciate your thoughts, as you seem to actually have experience with how regulation can be more of a burden than a help.

[wuapinmon]

The same thing is happening with the academic accrediting agencies. Every few years their demands for "assessments" get more and more onerous. While rooted in an excellent principle, "Are we accomplishing as educators what we claim to do?," the interpretation of results in "Five Year Plans" is sometimes shockingly Soviet in construction.

Accrediting bodies have tremendous power because the Federal Government will not authorize any federal financial aid (even private scholarships that demand a FAFSA) to schools without accreditation, so we must all bow before them.

[venkman]

The EPA is satan. They have a death grip on manufacturing and energy production and are puttin' the squeeze on. This isn't crazy right-wing talk, it's from the mouth of moderate, cap and trade supporting Jon Huntsman (well, maybe not the satan part).