More on Regulatory Capture

James Kwak (The Baseline Scenario) has written about “cultural capture”, an extension of the well known concept of “regulatory capture” that I used in my recent book “Euro Exit” to explain why big governments and big banks in Europe so strongly favor the single currency, the effects of which are so detrimental to growth. It also explains, I suggested in my speech at the Bruges Group (see my homepage), the replacement of the “common market” objective by the “single market” as the immediate purpose of the EU political integration policy.

Kwak now signals (January 25) that his analysis is being included in a collection of papers on the topic, that will be published by Cambridge University Press this year, but that you can download now,  here.

Authors include Richard Posner, Luigi Zingales (who has written very interesting things on the capture of economists), Tino Cuéllar and others. I haven’t read it yet but the chapters’ titles are quite appealing. And "preventing capture" should rank high among policy priorities in Europe.