S'nuff, s'nuff

Summer camp for the global financial elite will cost $2 million (plus whatever governments kick-in to pay their regulators' expenses);

The "Systemic Risk Institute" was designed as sort of a training regimen for regulators in charge of monitoring risks in the global financial system. It was conceived by Andrew Metrick, a professor and deputy dean at the Yale School of Management who worked on the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law and wanted to find a way to educate future decision makers about how the world reacted to crises of the past—and to build a community of regulators who can do better next time.

We hope Mr. Metrick didn't neglect to mention that Dodd-Frank won't prevent another housing bubble in the United States, since it didn't even try.

Mr. Metrick, who previously worked for President Barack Obama at the Council of Economic Advisers, secured a grant of about $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to start the program. When deciding who should get an invite, Mr. Metrick said he asked contacts in Washington to send someone "who will be whispering in the ear of the boss at the time of the next crisis." He also convinced international regulators to send promising employees.

Nine agencies have sent representatives, including the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., U.S. Treasury Department, International Monetary Fund, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, and Germany's Deutsche Bundesbank.

If they were really interested in doing something to prevent future financial crises, a copy of Calomiris and Haber's Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Financial Crises and Scarce Credit can be had for $25 on Amazon. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation could have bought 80,000 copies of it for what they're spending on this conference. About which, one of it's instructors (Yale Finance professor Gary Gorton) is quoted;

Mr. Gorton said the discussions have identified more obstacles than answers. "What surprised me is just how difficult these problems are," he said after witnessing some of the exchanges about international cooperation. "You get kind of depressed pretty quickly."

No kidding.