Saturday, June 8, 2013
Dynamic Regulation of the Financial Services Industry, by Wulf A. Kaal, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota - School of Law, was recently posted on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Governance adjustments via stable rules in reaction to financial crises are inevitably followed by relaxation, revision, and retraction. The economic conditions and the corresponding requirements for optimal and stable rules are constantly evolving, suggesting that a different set of rules could be optimal. Despite the risk of future crises, anticipation of future developments and preemption of possible future crises do not play a significant role in the regulatory framework and academic literature. Dynamic elements in financial regulation as a supplemental optimization process for rulemaking could help facilitate rulemaking when it is most needed – ex-ante before crises – to curtail the effects of crises and suboptimal regulatory outcomes – ex-post after crises. By including dynamic elements, the regulatory sine curve of financial regulation could be optimized in relation to the phase-shifted first derivative (cosine curve) that describes common elements of financial crises. Dynamic regulation could help dampen the degree of volatility of both the cosine curve and the regulatory sine curve by creating an anticipatory regulatory response to financial crises.