Histoire de la dérèglementation aux USA

[Nick de Cusa]

Un article de The Atlantic sur Timothy Geithner - chaudement récompensé - avec une approche pro interventioniste, mais néanmoins intéressant, contient cette version historique de la dérèglementation des années 80. Qui aurait en l'occurence commencé avant. Et qui a abouti (voir plus loin dans l'article) à ce que la Brookings et l'American Enterprise Institute créent un groupe de réflexion commun sur la dérèglementation de la finance en 1998 (!!)

La faiblesse de l'aricle est habituelle : dérèglementation regardée par le petit trou de la lorgnette. Par exemple, les capitaux minimum des banques encore plus réduits, sans mentionner par ailleurs des choses comme le F.D.I.C. on fausse l'information sur le risque.

…

Much of the thinking about the current crisis goes like this: the problem proceeded directly from the deregulation of the financial industry in the 1980s and ’90s, which was orchestrated by a handful of free-market academics and conservative think tanks that conspired with Wall Street to seduce Washington into going along. That’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The intellectual history of the movement to deregulate finance features radicals along with conservatives, and the process began being implemented under Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan. It wouldn’t have happened without Democrats.

Throughout most of American history, banking crises were frequent, debilitating occurrences that ranked as a first-order concern in national politics. Only when the New Deal reforms of the 1930s assigned the federal government an active role in managing risk did that change. There followed a long spell with no major upheavals, and banking receded as a popular concern. The impetus for doing away with regulations that gave every appearance of being remarkably effective came from two distinct realms of the academy that would appear, at a glance, to be extremely unlikely to find accord.

In the late 1960s, conservatives in the University of Chicago’s economics department, led by George Stigler, began arguing against New Deal regulatory agencies on the grounds that the businesses they were overseeing invariably dominated them, with the result that competition was inhibited. This idea was called “regulatory capture.” It became axiomatic among Chicago School types that if regulation couldn’t function as a disinterested public good, it should be abolished.

At roughly the same time, a group of New Left historians, many at the University of Wisconsin, rejected the prevailing liberal view that the Progressive era and New Deal reforms were a landmark achievement in the public interest. What the New Deal had really done, they decided, was sanctify an economic order that favored corporate interests. Their critique went by the name “corporate liberalism.” Where conservative neoclassical economists and Marxist historians converged was in their desire to “sever the corrupting ties between industry and government,” as Eduardo Canedo, an economic historian at Princeton University, puts it.

The corporate-liberal critique might never have made its way from Marxist historiography to Washington policy had it not resonated with someone who had an unparalleled ability to take ideas from outside the mainstream and force them to the center of public debate, someone who happened to be, right then, at the very apex of his influence: Ralph Nader. In the early 1970s, Nader’s attention was shifting from social regulations like automobile safety to economic regulations. He condemned what he called “corporate socialism,” but added a twist that horrified the Marxists. As a liberal who held no brief for unions, Nader began attacking government agencies for favoring the interests of business and labor over those of consumers. (Though he dropped his attacks on labor, he continued to advocate the abolition of a host of regulatory agencies, which he wanted to replace with a single superagency.) Jimmy Carter, who positioned himself a notch to the right of New Deal liberalism, also found appeal in undoing regulations. In 1978, working with the Democratic Congress, he deregulated the airline industry. Rail, trucking, and natural gas followed. It was Carter who struck the first big blow against banking rules, by signing the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, which loosened interest-rate limits and allowed more bank mergers, and he gave every sign that he would have kept going had he been able to.

Reagan’s victory ought to have hastened what Carter had begun—but it didn’t. Canedo, who studies the history of deregulation, has a persuasive theory about why: opposition from the Democratic Congress. “Reagan wanted to undo not just economic regulation,” he says, “but social regulation—environmental and workplace safety rules—and was so flagrant with some of his appointees, and the lack of enforcement, that he bred a backlash. It was too ideological.” Democrats recoiled. But liberal antipathy toward Reagan did not abolish the impulse to deregulate; it simply held it in check. “The intellectual orientation of the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the Reagan years was much closer to Wall Street than anyone admits today,” Canedo says. When Bill Clinton was elected, pent-up Democratic desire, gladly facilitated by the new Republican leadership in Congress in 1995, unleashed the wave of deregulation that culminated in 1999 with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the seminal New Deal banking reform.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archiv…inside-man/7992

Quelqu'un pour me démolir la première phrase que j'ai mis en gras?

[Rincevent]

Il n'y a pas à démolir la première phrase grassée, elle est globalement exacte. L'histoire monétaire des USA est mouvementée et passionnante.

En revanche, le titre est faux. C'est sous Ford que le mouvement de dérégulation a commencé (c'est Greenspan qui le dit, et il était aux premières loges à l'époque).