Why is this a problem?

The Observer tells us that there’s a certain tension between the European Union’s thoughts on what the City should be and what some others think it should become.

The second aim is to keep London as close as possible to the EU’s evolving rulebook. In this way it would be prevented from branching out to become the western equivalent of Singapore, which has become wildly popular with bankers and investors after adopting a simple, laissez-faire set of regulations.

Shouldn’t a market be wildly popular with the people who are involved in that market?

If no farmers, bakers nor flour millers were happy with the structure and operation of the wheat market we’d think that a failing of the structure of the wheat market. If all the people who use cars and all the people who produce cars thought that the market for cars was an over-regulated, constipatory, mess we’d think that we’d got the regulation of the car market wrong.

If the providers, users and market middlemen in the market for capital find laissez faire regulation to be wildly popular doesn’t that mean that we should be instigating laissez faire policies in the market for capital?

No, not anarcho-capitalism, Singapore has a strong and firm insistence upon such things as property rights and the rule of law.

So why is it a problem, something we have to avoid, that a market be wildly, teemingly, popular with the participants in that market? What is it that we’re trying to achieve by regulating it into not being so? Other than the imposition of that haute bourgeois disdain for trade that is?

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