On today's Planet Money:
We look back on the last century of banking regulation.
-- Chana Joffe-Walt leads a tour of Presidential responses to banking crises since 1907. Highlights of the trip include regulation posturing from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, George Bush and Bill Clinton, plus Alex Blumberg singing along with Lady Gaga.
-- Is regulation a necessity or an opiate of the market? Harvard Business School professor David Moss argues that those massive institutions that pose a systemic risk must be regulated. George Selgin, an economist at the University of Georgia, worries that the wrong kind of regulation can lead to even greater disaster.
Bonus: Comment of the week, after the jump.
Download the podcast; or subscribe. Intro music: The Cure's "Close to Me." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.
A lot of you took exception to Monday's podcast, "The Trouble With Tariffs." We asked you to imagine that America slapped a tariff on toothbrushes from China so they cost the same as ones from a factory in Ohio. Then everyone pays more. Maybe the global market is saying that Ohio shouldn't be making tootbrushes, that the best place for that is China.
Whew. Alan Kleiman speaks for the masses on this one:
The conceit that economists actually know what's best seems fairly ridiculous, given current circumstances. I mean, take the tariff example: why is the Ohio tootbrush factory much more expensive than the Chinese one? Is the Chinese one using what is effectively slave labor while the Ohio one allows for borderline decent lifestyles? Are they respecting environmental regulations? Is the cheapest-possible toothbrush really in the consumer's best interest in this case? It's what you get when modern economic theory seems to focus on serving as mouthpieces for corporations — like we need more of that.
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