russia is losing on our. technology innovation all these developments from the russian we've got this huge earth coverage. you're just joining us seven thirty here in moscow on parents here's a look at your headlines broken news journalists who've resigned from al-jazeera accuse station also has a plan for getting the courts to broadcast their views rather than show what's really happening in the conflict torn syria unconfirmed footage coming out of the country is making it easier for spin doctors to manipulate the facts for political ends. i'm david cameron all over their afghanistan strategy are to the

massacre of sixteen people by the american soldier in the country both leaders say they're happy with progress on the war but despite theory among afghans over recent outrageous. china warns of the urgent need to slow down its economic growth and bring in political reforms to avert political and financial disaster this comes at the time i go in depth rate in europe because of the world's second largest economy as a potential. the next out with money and credit in short supply across europe cross-talk examines what needs to be learned from the economic pitfalls of two thousand and stay with us. the kick. started. to. flow in welcome across the track your world is more or less better this is the

question still being asked when there are calls for regulation of the financial markets of the lessons of the two thousand and eight prices to learn the speculation control the markets and can free markets do better things than regulators. can start. to cross out financial regulation i'm joined by arnold clean in washington he's a founder and coeditor of the economics blog econ log and in warsaw we have patrick young he is executive director of devi advisors and editor of the gathering storm and immigrate we go to glen while he is an assistant professor of economics at the university of chicago or a gentleman crossed micros in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want a first i'd like to go to glenn in madrid are you in your co-author erica posner consul bit of a stir by coming out with a paper titled just recently a proposal for limiting speculation on derivatives a f t a for financial innovation ok now there was

a lot of press about it why now and why do you think new financial instruments should be regulated like drugs. basically every developed country. requires that drugs before they are marketed are tested for safety and efficacy because consumers. would have to heard of a time figuring out on their own with such complex effects the drugs can have whether the drugs are safe and efficacious and also the health consequences of drugs not being safe and efficacious are too dangerous for a society to allow it and i think we found out in the two thousand and eight crisis their financial products can be at least as if not more complicated then drugs can in their effects and then there are potential consequences for the world economy can be at least as dangerous as those of drugs for the public health so we think

that there's a close analogy between these and therefore that he makes a lot of sense for a new financial products to be subject to pre-approval regulation based on careful research the same way that drugs are ok arnold what do you think about that you think the new financial instruments should be treated like drugs i mean we're talking about consumers. well i think the regulation in finance has to be done and i think you when you phrase the question more or less i think that's the wrong way to phrase it i think it's sensible or not sensible i just don't see how using the drug analogy can be sensible so we go back to the goals of regulation in finance one is consumer protection and it's definitely true that financial institutions can be more sophisticated than individual consumers and so they can exploit consumers' lack of knowledge and you want to stop that. for

reasons i'll explain that the idea of testing products doesn't really work for them then the second reason you want to regulate the financial industry is to avoid the kind of meltdown the systemic breakdown so we're talking about. here i think the testing of financial products the analogy with drugs completely breaks down because when you test something you test it in a safe under certain conditions and when you do there with a drug you can be pretty confident if you do the testing properly that the results in your sample will translate to the purple articulated in that spirit. arnold it seems to me that the entire financial system at least from two thousand and five on was rigged to make sure some people got rich without any care whatsoever about society and the economy patrick if i can go to you i mean i'll stay with more or less regulation ok because what happened in two thousand and eight is a catastrophe for the ninety nine percent not the one percent so i i would maybe go

on the side of glen a little bit more why not have a little bit more testing would it really hurt to test some of these products to see if they're good for society because blacks because they are just good because glenn and his co-author talk about social values which i think is interesting in terms of finance ok patrick go first and i want to go to. there's a lovely concept in here there's a beautiful idea but the fundamental problem we have is it's comparing science with economics not economics calls itself a social science the science element is probably overstated peter and i think that's the fundamental difficulty we have with the concept of like why an f.d.a. style regulation two products because actually you can't go and simply take a control group of markets and go and test things at the same time do we need to review and revise and look at regulation i think we do i think we need to look at regulation at all times but i think we need to calvary up against that the fact that actually in history there has never been

a single instance where one regulatory bought body in any country has managed to actually see the next crash coming and i think the issue that's actually very interesting here is that possibly science is almost a billion with the sophistication of recent financial markets because. you know in the old days you had bunches a guy some of that went to business school some of them just went to school until they were sixteen or eighteen the problem now is everybody comes with m.b.a.'s masters in finance degrees and the problem is you can do a teacher really just the sophisticated way to give you you know good theory to decide whether or not to go to the bathroom oh limit lee has a large dose to build a lot of money to jumble into the financial markets that doesn't help anybody and actually i would even contend it doesn't help the one percent because i think that in itself is somewhat overblown were the one percent would say of which was wrong was by governments and that's actually got nothing to do with financial regulation are either all right there are all we need to look at is intelligent pragmatic

regulation or into our old scathingly plan i mean if you where this whole program was designed around you here is that the whole program was designed around this paper that you wrote so i want to use my charm is one to do as you hear internals point. yes so arnold's point was that you know science. and. academic and economics are fundamentally different and there are regulations that are purely based currently on economic analysis. in particular the review of. by the u.s. and the european union even though you can't do controlled experiments in a you know small part of the market there are still techniques that are used and i don't think almost anyone advocates getting rid of the regulation of mergers the sky and preapproval using economic data analysis so the fact that it's an economic

science or they're an idea is really what we need to see is that you need to appreciate that we can't do it in a control circumstance i mean there are two hundred fifty major financial centers throughout this world if you say for example the united states of america in the united kingdom two of the hugest financial markets in the world are going to go through this f.d.a. approval then what you're going to get is shanghai hong kong singapore multiple other financial centers perhaps by who knows they're going to build and just implement the product anyway and i think that's the difficulty i don't disagree with you that there are methodology that can be deployed but to put in a full on f.d.a. i turn around and say you can't list a new product until we've decided whether it's good for us or not actually that would have stifled incredible financial regulation that is help. me. here because we what we just heard there from patrick and i want to go right now to arnold do markets do better than regulators arnold. that's

not a there's not a pure question i don't think you should take one extreme you should have faith in that markets are you know this is television ok so i'm trying to make it simple for my viewers as possible go ahead i was in investment banking for years i understand ok ok and you shouldn't have faith that banks are always wrong one important point i'll just make about the financial crisis a lot of people talk about how consumers were hurt by predatory lending and some of that took place but most of it was not predatory lending is when a qualified bar or gets a mortgage that's worse than they deserve it was really going on in the housing bubble was a lot of on qualified borrowers getting better mortgages than they deserve so it's a very appealing to have a simple narrative of one side is right one side is wrong but the fact is it's nuanced and i just want to go back to this issue of the f.d.a. if you're going to use the f.d.a. as an analogy with the f.d.a.

symbolizes to me is the controlled experiment that's what they brought in and if you're just talking about pre-approval well pre-approval is it's a whole different story and not my simple point is that controlled experiments don't apply in financial products you experiment in one sense circumstances and you say gee when we try to sample of subprime mortgages in two thousand and three it worked really well so we should have proved that you don't realize that that speak that they work because house prices were appreciating and they don't work in a different environment or you could say that pro folio insurance in the middle one nine hundred eighty s. worked fine when a small group of people were using a proposal line jumping ahead. this is now we're advocating in the proposal we're advocating the use of economic data and not based on prior prior

experimental trials but based on projections of demands for products in the same way that antitrust authorities used to project the effects of mergers which is a methodology that i was you disagree with it but it's one that's been used for more than forty years but but my other side of the engine is the m.t.a. analogy the m.t.a. an l.g. is very misleading ok patrick jump in well also i think fundamentally i mean the problem i have is that using this analogy of existing data then in that case we'd never have got futures and options markets i mean there was a new demand as such that people can forsee for them yet as a result of their coming into being a huge amount of risk transfer has taken place farmers in india are able to hedge their crops in a way more efficient way than the top down indian government was ever to do with able to do by dictating what they should do so i think that's the problem i would see here i think it's a very well intentioned paper but frankly i think the problem is that you know well we can't argue yes or no as to regulation and this on the other arnel is quite

correct you can't vilify the banks all of the time despite what many people would like to say about it but they are wrong sometimes and at the same time not a single person has been yet prosecuted for signing a liar loan so you have the regulatory failures throughout this market what i see is that we really need to try and find a way of being more pragmatic and certainly perhaps doors involve using data to a certain degree but pre-approval would be very worrying to me all right gentlemen i'm going to jump in here and we're going to we're breaking out of that short break we'll continue our discussion on the regulation of financial instruments state park . and. if you can.

today. again fled up. these are the images. from the streets of canada. today please. please. tell me where the for my for is are made and can be tested to the limits if. developed from a craft into an industry. where rough flocks turn into words of beauty. and village called newspaper. russia. to keep the peace.

in the world to. welcome back to. remind you we're talking about the regulation of financial markets . and the p.p.p. still live. ok i'd like to go back to glenn and madrid i read your paper with with enormous interest ok because it seems to me that what has been done since two thousand and eight is certainly not enough and what you advocate and please correct me if i'm not if i'm wrong you're just saying we should go back to an environment of the one nine hundred ninety s. are not advocating a revolution here as advocating going back to what made sense before speculation went wild. yes and not just in the one nine hundred ninety s. but for hundreds of years prior to this in the common law tradition coming out of

the united kingdom there's been a doctrine that you can't buy insurance against the life of someone like the present in the united states whose death doesn't affect you negatively you can't just go out there and in buy insurance against things which you have no interest in and effectively what's happened in financial markets is rather than being an opportunity like patrick said before the break for people who insure themselves against fluctuations in the value of their crops or against you know bad things that could happen to them in their lives it's just become a venue for people betting on the sorts of speculative endeavors and that's not what the financial markets were set up for that's not why that's why we have prohibitions against wagering in gambling in most countries and i think all of that eric and i are trying to do is to restore basically

a long standing tradition that tried to distinguish between abuses of financial markets for speculation and betting from beneficial uses of furniture markets that allowed people to insure themselves against risks and spread those risks more evenly across the economy ok arnold what do you think about that that seems really reasonable. well i've heard i've now heard three versions of the paper one for asian is that we're going to we want the analogy with the f.d.a. but then when i raised the issue experiments you said no no that's not what it meant i meant pre-approval and now i'm hearing a third thing which is going back to some common law tradition about defining what's a legitimate financial instrument and what's not so first we're going to use experiments then we're going to use data and then we're going to use common law tradition so i really don't know what i'm arguing against ok what i would argue for if you want to clarify that it's your paper you want to clarify that.

we think that in the modern world in order to have an effective regulatory agency it needs to like the f.d.a. preapproved products he needs to like the. f.t.c. in the european commission use data to determine whether the products are net beneficial and harmful and it needs to draw on the traditions which inspired those principles from the common law but. but which need to be modernized using the techniques of modern economic analysis ok patrick it seems to me and i was trying not to make it too simplistic here but it seems to me we glenn and his his co-author are advocating is cutting out an enormous amount of speculation because when we see what's happened in the financial markets when derivatives were introduced and all that things went nuts ok and some people made an enormous amount of money and a lot of people lost their livelihood my reading of it is that it's controlling

speculation. well i got to say you know the problem i see here is first of all i disagree with you actually derivatives have been more of a power for good in many respects than they've been a power for harm the thing about derivatives are they're like icebergs you only see the little bit on top which is the bit that ultimately sinks the titanic the thing that's you know two thirds or three quarters under the water that's the thing that helps many people which in fact glenn himself is quite rightly pointing out have been hugely beneficial he brings up this point which goes back to the size of the bubble of seven hundred twenty you can't buy life insurance on other people that is quite feasible a reasonable concept the difficulty i have and here i suppose not i am also agreeing with arnold is that you three core major precepts i mean if we look at what's going on in the world at the moment there's this huge bill going through america called dodd frank and i advise italy i mean it's now up to something like six and a half thousand pages how can anybody in their right mind expect to use that to create any sort of a framework apart from

a large amount of paper that you can go and sit on or possibly make a sofa and i think that's the problem we're running into here peter is that actually what we can talk about these lovely concepts all day but actually we've got a nightmare coming up because everybody's going to be potentially in danger of wearing an orange jumpsuit because they won't know what they're able to do and if we don't have any markets whatsoever then reasonable commerce is going to come to a hold because actually i think arnold said it best first of all you can't be extreme you can't of total regulation because that stalin ism and those markets didn't work terribly well and you can't have complete art not capitalism which admittedly we've never really seen in the world but i suppose you could argue happened during the industrial revolution because that's going to be a mass ny argument is as a practitioner we need pragmatism and that means simplicity and the problem is as we go on and on and on and every time there seems to be a question we out another degree of complexity to the regulation it's not going to work here's my suggestion bottom up not top down let's go ahead here in europe really avoid the ones who are here who haven't done enough for two thousand years

when jump in head. so patrick you you admitted that not being able to buy life insurance on someone who you're not related to is a create you know it's a very reasonable proposal but prior to two thousand c.d.'s volume credit default swap volume in the united states was essentially zero because there was a rule that you couldn't buy insurance on a bond that you didn't own and then this state of new york he decided i wrote an article in my crew ninety. three with trillion dollars we wanted we want to do is a national public record assurance on future negotiations ok arnold jumpiness i can hang on hang on i want to i will be here with a few minutes of arguing that it was good ok jed arnold jump in where you stand on all this was going arnold's in washington on the air. let's go to washington arnold jump in please. if we had

a choice between if we knew the difference between. dangerous speculation and valid investment we wouldn't be here today if human beings and regulators understood that we wouldn't be here today the regulators sauce credit default swaps they saw our mortgage securities and they said it was good i can show you quotes from ben bernanke saying how much better in two thousand and six risk management was in the financial sector because of these products so if you yes if you assume that regulators have godlike powers and absolutely give them total authority the problem is they don't and so there's there are two cases for simplicity and regulation one is that it's better for markets but the other is that it's better for regulators to just play within their game so to speak and so on consumer product safety regulation you just need some simple principles of not

selling products inappropriately to people not fooling people and not and not selling them products that they have no chance of benefiting from and you just want to implement those took a little but arnold. to make if it's so simple why is it you know you said absolutely because we're stuck on the idea of letter and let me try to give you let me show you a sense you have to align it in terms of products were not it needs to be i would argue for a principles based regulation where you put out the principle that you don't sell somebody a financial product that they can't benefit from and you don't sell them a financial product that they can't understand and then we you audit against companies ability to implement that to have that principle imbedded in their corporate structure and to train their employees in that way. that to me is the

most natural approach rather than trying to do product by product i guess you doing it is how you want to resist the one or all street would like that because then they would make as much money when you wanted to jump in there go ahead. yeah. yeah i mean i i i think that if you offered the banks the choice between what arnold's proposing in forced vigorously and what we're proposing i have no doubt that they would choose what we're proposing but his broad principle that you don't sell anyone anything that they won't benefit from i mean you would have a zillion lawsuits from people who just you know their their company wasn't doing well and so they angry and they decided that it was the fault of the bank i mean i think relative to the world where you really in force what arnold is saying they would much prefer to have the certainty that they would have a pretty and provable that would you know protect them against the possibility of frivolous lawsuits going forward i don't think it's really feasible i didn't. think

if you think i don't think regulators can determine the value of of a particular product how is a court expose some judge going to figure out whether it was in the consumer's interests or not to have bought this product will do you want to you have to set up you know you'd have to set up a lot of examples and precedents examples in the legislation in precedence over time so you say well i mean we have examples of suitability requirements that are hard suitability requirements for whether you can let's say invest in a in a start up private company and you have to be a qualified investor and what have you now those are hard requirements but you could use examples like that or examples of products that don't give people a chance to benefit like my favorite example is somebody who converts year by week your regular mortgage will buy a weekly mortgage and charge you such a high fee that you can't possibly benefit from that product you can set up

examples like that and say here's an example that clearly violates that here's an example that clearly doesn't and use those as precedence in court and i agree it's not there's nothing perfect here but when you send a precise. pound breeze where it's going to happen is that the financial the businesses are so much smarter they go right to the boundary stay within the boundary and still rip off the consumer ok i want to know how do you know any of the parish a last word on this program where is the car like i actually don't. want to tell a child with patrick i don't know what's the what's the pat what's the compromise patrick you get the last word peter you know something i think what we're hearing here is we've got some very good sign docket amica ideas originally in this paper the difficulty is the complexity and ultimately what we need with regulation is something that can be encapsulated relatively simply i must say i like the idea of principles you know the old days the stock market worked on the basis of my word is my bond there has been terrible excess in this market there have been terrible

problems there has been an issue with c.d.'s became too big i wrote about it in the late one nine hundred ninety s. about how big a bubble there was brewing in these bring in these things there have been liar loans the regulators themselves have not behaved particularly well but simply throwing lots more regulation at the market isn't going to help because here's the rub as the market evolves so do that so to do the market players and therefore you know this is a little bit like defense you know the way we always go back after a war we analyze what happened in the last one and then we prepared if i could next work we would run out of time here so i really like what you have to say tantric finance and principals ok many thanks and i guess it is in washington warsaw and in madrid and thanks to our viewers for watching as you are to see you next time and remember across the. street.