The Wall Street Journal always publishes a special themed section on Mondays and this week’s edition is particularly relevant to Globaloney readers. It’s titled“Fixing Global Finance” and brings together a variety of experts and policy-makers to discuss four areas of international concern: the TBTF (too big to fail) problem, international financial regulation, financial innovation and “the regulatory frontier,” which involves an attempt to reconsider the fundamentals of financial regulation.

The report makes good reading and the list of 20 action points is a good beginning. Although I don’t agree with all the points made in this discussion I support the idea of a comprehensive approach to the problem of global financial stability. These are complicated problems and I resist simple solutions such as a Tobin tax or increased transparency.

A Tobin tax may be a good idea in the context of other changes and it is hard to argue against transparency, but the notion that you can just tax or shine lights and then financial markets will take care of the rest is naive. And that’s not globaloney.

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