British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been talking with President Obama this morning, and high on the agenda was the PM’s call for international banking regulation. The interesting thing is that both Obama and Brown have blamed lack of regulation for the banking crisis, when there is clear evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that it was bad and inept regulation that drove the crisis. For an example from the US, here’s John Carney on how bad regulations helped…

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The bailout bill that passed through Congress today seeks to solve the financial mess by massively increasing government involvement in private finance. But more Government cannot be the answer to a government-created problem. The fact is that short-sighted government policies distorted the market in the first place. Bankers were certainly to blame for responding to these signals from government in the hope of a quick buck, but at its base, much of the problem was caused by government.

These are the…

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