Regulation

Today, the new Treasury Secretary (Tim Geithner) announced his proposal for implementing some new regulations in the financial markets. In short, he has come up with a system of checks and balances to ensure that things like hedge funds, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that have remained largely unregulated start getting some oversight.

There are a lot of people out there who will say "this is awful, the government should stay out of the markets," or "the government can't do anything right, they'll ruin capitalism." Republicans and conservatives will argue that this is just a massive expansion of government that's going to cost the taxpayers billions.

• Newsflash - it's the absence of regulation that got us into this mess. People (let's call them idiots) theorized that the investment banks would self-regulate in a free market. Now, we're spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out and avoid the complete collapse of the credit markets because that "self-regulation" never happened. So let's compare the cost of implementing these regulations to the cost we've already incurred from not having them.
• Geithner also took time to specifically explain the areas of the financial markets that he thinks it would be foolish to try and regulate, in some cases because it's impractical, and in other cases because it would simply cause too much interference in the markets. So this is NOT a government takeover of Wall St.