I recently gave an update on America’s economic policy, such as it is, to a group of bankers. I expected a great deal of interest in the Republican tax plan, but instead, they wanted to talk about how costly it was for them to comply with the rules introduced by the Dodd-Frank reform bill.
While sympathizing with their plight — the cost of regulatory compliance has clearly risen over the last decade — I asked them to recall the last financial crisis, a set of catastrophic, deep-recession-inducing events that motivated the creation of Dodd-Frank in the first place.
