Financial Innovation Under Fire
Peter Coy writing in BusinessWeek:
Leave it to Wall Street to give innovation a bad name. Americans prize out-of-the-box thinking in technology and culture, but they fear it in finance—understandably, thanks to innovative disasters like credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and “negatively amortizing” mortgages whose principal grows instead of shrinking.
In spite of the public’s mistrust, entrepreneurs and academics are plunging ahead. They’re working on ideas they hope will help the consumer borrow more safely and build wealth more reliably. Some are ambitious, like reducing homeowners’ exposure to declines in local housing prices. Others are fanciful, like an electronically rigged wallet that becomes harder to open when your bank account is low, an idea from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The big problem: It’s hard to tell the beneficial ideas from the ones that are self-serving or dangerous. Many top economists, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, once lauded subprime mortgages as a fantastic innovation. With this fresh in mind, there’s a risk that government will overreact and suppress good ideas along with bad ones.
Read the full article here
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