What's Wrong with Financial Services Regulation?

To answer the question posed in the title of this post go here. Just keep clicking on the links on the right and make up your own minds.

Done that?

Now, whose diseased brain could possibly be behind such a thing?

Moses needed just 10 rules. Works for me.

Update

Since drafting this yesterday I found more supporting evidence for the scrapping of the FSA and the whole 'regulatory' structure born out of Brown's Bonkanomics.

First, an excellent article in the Telegraph from Philip Booth here.

Second a linked post from the ever excellent Adam Smith Institute here.

Both of these pieces exactly mirror all that I have been saying about the complete fatuousness of the current regulatory system since, well, since it was created. Working within it and meeting and speaking to its apparatchiks over the last 9 years demonstrated clearly to me just how hopeless it was.

My business works on the basis that if we do what is right for the clients and adopt good practice as to how we document and record what we advise, compliance will be automatic. Experience has taught me that the reality is that the FSA needs to work out how to comply with us.

We are now in an endgame. There are two possible outcomes. One, a future of dispiriting, unfair and immoral bureaucratic capitalism, or two, a bright future of freedom and responsibility with massively smaller bureaucracies and government.

The FSA realises this and is now resorting to ever more Draconian and coercive behaviour towards market participants as it desperately tries to rebuild its collapsed credibility, shift the blame for the financial failure away from itself and hence justify its continued existence.

To anyone working in financial services (with the exception of the Bankers) the FSA's wish to ever recover its credibility is deluded. Trust, like virginity, can only be lost once.

As to whether we are condemned to a cartelised, bureaucratic, dispiriting and hopeless future depends entirely on us. Our vote, when Brown deigns to allow us to exercise it, will decide on that, or possibly not given the current crop of pathetic statist politicos of all creeds.