The weight of compliance

Compliance is set to become a core area in financial services because one result of the current financial crisis is that people will want to prevent another similar disaster from occurring and the method used to fight this will be (likely) regulation.

After the Great Depression there was a wave of compliance and regulatory measures brought in and it was during this time that the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) was created, thus guaranteeing depositors funds were safe.

Basel II which was seen as the ‘new’ answer to how risk was mitigated will probably be replaced by some other form of guidance, we’ll call it Basel III for the sake of prediction, or Basel II 2.0 or whatever you like. The fact is that the burden of compliance is set to rise but if not done correctly it could actually happen with little or no benefit to clients or the broader economy.

If compliance becomes weighted heavily in a process rather than principles based approach then it could hamper innovation and the creation of …

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Ludwig von Mises, Economist, Libertarian.

What kind of man was Ludwig von Mises? As this unique film shows, Mises (1881-1973) was a man who never stopped fighting for freedom: not when the Nazis burned his books, not when the Left blackballed him at universities, not when it seemed as if statism had won. With courage and genius, he fought big government until the day he died in 25 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 60 years of teaching.

Mises’s battles against Communists, Nazis, and other socialists, are featured in this film, as are his ideas of Liberty. There is also the old Vienna he loved, the Bolshevik prime minister he dissuaded from Communism, and a cast of villains from Lenin to Hitler, as well as such supporters and students as Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Bettina Greaves, M. Stanton Evans, Mary Peterson, Joseph Sobran, and Yuri Maltsev.

Among his many accomplishments, Mises showed that socialism had to fail, that central banking causes recessions and depressions, that the gold standard is honest money, and that only laissez-faire capitalism is fully compatible with Western civilization.

Mises …

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