June 07, 2010
Robert Samuelson tells us that the problem behind the Gulf oil spill and the housing bubble meltdown is not the corruption of industry and regulators, but rather complacency born of success. In the case of the oil industry, Samuelson noted that the industry has been drilling close to 1.6 million barrels a day, with only a few hundred barrels a year being spilled. He makes a similar argument about the financial sector, noting the sharp decline in daily stock market volatility.
It is worth noting that the sort of bad events that one expects in these sectors are almost by definition going to be very rare (we will not have huge spills or financial collapses on a weekly basis) and very costly. Any regulator must understand this fact and if they are competent would not allow their judgment to be affected by the absence of a bad event for a long period of time. The cost of the economic meltdown will be at least $5 trillion in lost output in the United States alone. By contrast, the benefits from reduced daily volatility are trivial. (How much do you care if you risk buying a stock at a price that is 0.2 percent too high, when you have an equal probability of getting it at a price that is 0.2 percent too low?)
So, if our regulators cannot understand the potential harm from extremely rare, but extremely costly, disasters, then the country has a very serious problem.
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