Gouvernement ou lobbying comme cause de la crise ?

Simon Johnson offre un bel article que je vous conseille vivement de lire ("The Libertarian and the Lobbyists", ici) autour des propos de certains candidats à la Maison Blanche accusant le gouvernement de ne pas être la solution à la crise. L'auteur propose une lecture différente en démontrant que c'est le lobbying actifs des entreprises financières qui a orienté les actions gouvernementales et le laissez-faire qui s'est montré si dévastateur.

A mon habitude, je vous offre quelques morceaux choisis de cet article : "(...) The first view is that governments simply lost control of the situation, either through incompetence or because politicians were pursuing their own agendas. This is the view heard most frequently from the political right – for example, from people who think that the main problem in the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008 was government housing policies. In the United States, among the candidates still competing for the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge Barack Obama in November’s presidential election, Ron Paul stands out for arguing consistently that government is the problem, not the answer, with regard to banking. If the government were removed more fully from the financial sector (including abolishing the Federal Reserve), he argues, the economy would function better. The second view is that the financial sector lobbied long and hard for deregulation in recent decades, and spent a great deal of time and money persuading politicians that it constituted the safe and modern approach to banking. According to this view, government policies did not fail; on the contrary, they operated exactly as intended – and as bought and paid for. (...) Ron Paul is right to point to imbalances of power and massive distortions within the financial sector. He is also correct that many government policies favor relatively few big firms – and favor them in a way that encourages excessive and dangerous risk-taking. But Paul and others are wrong to argue that the government is the ultimate cause of all financial evil. Executives in financial firms want to take big risks. They like arrangements under which they win even when they lose".

Je profite de cet article pour vous renvoyer à deux lectures qui pourront enrichir vos réflexions :

- La première est cette très intéressante publication de Deniz Igan and Prachi Mishra "Three's Company: Wall Street, Capitol Hill and AND K Street" (ici) démontrant que "Finally, whether a lobbyist worked for a politician and whether a politician worked in the financial industry in the past influence the vote in favor of lax regulation. These results give support to the notion that political influence of the financial elite has influence in shaping the regulatory landscape" ;

- La seconde est ce livre publié chez Larcier (dont je vous avais parlé dans un précédent billet) qui analyse le lobbying en matière de justice et de procès "Lobbying et procès orchestré" (ici).

A la prochaine...