Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged regulation →  View Popular

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the
end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and
was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being
knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the
barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had
been given $29 billion in public money to marry its
hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a
share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the
morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly
$270 million.

This is precisely the role played by the FDP. The party leadership immediately moved to repudiate statements by CDU politicians that the new government would not contemplate changes to laws restricting the firing of workers.

Banks may continue to outsource credit packages from their balance sheets and transfer them to tax havens, which are largely free of any oversight. This means that banks can hide away billions that do not appear in their official balance sheets. Such practices have already resulted in losses amounting to tens, or even hundreds of billions—most notably in Germany in the case of several state banks and Hypo Real Estate.

So while it seems crazy, it's true: Today, in a country that for the last eight years has been defined by questionable intelligence-gathering techniques and interrogation methods, the U.S. government is no more restricted in carrying out nonconsensual, classified research on human subjects than it was after World War II.

This divide between the present regulatory philosophy and industrial reality is a consequence, indeed a legacy, of how media industries (broadcast and cable, for example) have been unevenly and separately regulated as technology has converged.

As a result, the government is driven more by the concerns of the market as opposed to the public interest or by a philosophy that is relevant to current conditions; the size and scope of mergers has put regulators in the back seat, following the lead of market activity rather than setting the boundaries.

Merkel and Sarkozy bluntly rejected US calls for the major European countries to expand their stimulus programs and instead urged Obama and other G20 leaders to focus on stronger and more internationally supervised regulation of financial institutions, including hedge funds and similar unregulated firms, laying down this and other "red lines" as a condition for achieving unity at today's summit.

The idea of an Information Age academy appears, however, to be anathema to many of the bureaucrats who infest the formal academic world. This is not surprising since an Information Age academy would be as far beyond their control as it is beyond their comprehension.

As a consequence, agriculture should become "an international priority, with the poorest countries being helped to safeguard the security and independence of their own food supplies," the author claims. 

The French Presidency of the EU is calling for broadband for all?

The French Presidency took over one of my slogans. I have always been pleading for broadband for all. That should be our goal. Now we are standing on average at a 20% penetration rate, the same average as in the United States. But four of our member states are world leaders in broadband penetration. They are even ahead of South Korea. Moreover, when you come to coverage, this figure dramatically rises. There are many member states where coverage is up to 100%.

Due to the current penetration rate, don't you think the objective is too ambitious?

If you have goals which are not ambitious, you will always be slow. We have to win the race for broadband. It will have huge economic and societal impact.

The governance of the Internet is of outmost importance. We will have to apply European rules on freedom of the Internet and on protection of individuals and their own freedoms. We think that is important to have regional hubs for the governance of the internet and we are going to build those hubs.