Unbridled and unrestrained capitalism ?

Thomas DiLorenzo has an excellent smackdown of the myth that the global financial crisis (GFC) was caused by unrestrained, unregulated American capitalism.

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Laissez-faire run amok in financial markets is said to be a cause of the current crisis. But the Fed alone - a secret government organization that is accountable to no one and which has never been audited - performs hundreds of regulatory functions, in addition to recklessly manipulating the money supply. And it is just one of numerous financial regulatory agencies (the SEC, Comptroller of the Currency, Office of Thrift Supervision, FDIC, and numerous state regulators also exist). In a Fed publication entitled "The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions," it is explained that "The Federal Reserve has supervisory and regulatory authority over a wide range of financial institutions and activities." That's the understatement of the century. Among the Fed's functions are the regulation of

• Bank holding companies
• State-chartered banks
• Foreign branches of member banks
• Edge and agreement corporations
• US state-licensed branches, agencies, and representative offices of foreign banks
• Nonbanking activities of foreign banks
• National banks (with the Comptroller of the Currency)
• Savings banks (with the Office of Thrift Supervision)
• Nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies
• Thrift holding companies
• Financial reporting
• Accounting policies of banks
• Business "continuity" in case of an economic emergency
• Consumer-protection laws
• Securities dealings of banks
• Information technology used by banks
• Foreign investments of banks
• Foreign lending by banks
• Branch banking
• Bank mergers and acquisitions
• Who may own a bank
• Capital "adequacy standards"
• Extensions of credit for the purchase of securities
• Equal-opportunity lending
• Mortgage disclosure information
• Reserve requirements
• Electronic-funds transfers
• Interbank liabilities
• Community Reinvestment Act subprime lending requirements
• All international banking operations
• Consumer leasing
• Privacy of consumer financial information
• Payments on demand deposits
• "Fair credit" reporting
• Transactions between member banks and their affiliates
• Truth in lending
• Truth in savings

That's a pretty comprehensive list, the result of 96 years of bureaucratic empire building by Fed bureaucrats. It gives the lie to the notion that there has been "too little regulation" of financial markets. Anyone who makes such an argument is either ignorant of the truth or is lying.