The first rule of government should be to 'do no harm'. Cameron-Osborne have passed the test this week.
Perhaps it might have been different if he wasn't at 52% in the polls but David Cameron's 'we mustn't let The Left destroy the City' message is a lot more responsible than John McCain's reaction to this week's financial turmoil. The Wall Street Journal takes Senator McCain to task for his attacks on the financial sector and regulators:
"In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. He'll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore, circa 2000."
See the full WSJ argument here. The rush to "real regulation" (as demanded by the equally bad Barack Obama) is just like the herd behaviour that has brought many of the current problems. David Brooks makes these points in his New York Times column. He also wonders where all the new super-brained regulators are going to come from:
"We’re going to need regulators who can anticipate what the next Wall Street business model is going to look like, and how the next crisis will be different than the current one. We’re going to need squads of low-paid regulators who can stay ahead of the highly paid bankers, auditors and analysts who pace this industry (and who themselves failed to anticipate this turmoil). We’re apparently going to need an all-powerful Super-Fed than can manage inflation, unemployment, bubbles and maybe hurricanes — all at the same time! We’re going to need regulators who write regulations that control risky behavior rather than just channeling it off into dark corners, and who understand what’s happening in bank trading rooms even if the C.E.O.’s themselves are oblivious... To sum it all up, this supposed new era of federal activism is going to confront some old problems: the lack of information available to government planners, the inability to keep up with or control complex economic systems, the fact that political considerations invariably distort the best laid plans."
I used to work at the Bank of England (before Brown gave away its regulatory functions). The Bank constantly losts its best brains (with a few notable exceptions) to financial companies that could pay a lot, lot more money. Recent events aren't going to change that stubborn reality.
