The barrier to financial reform is political power, not legislative complexity

Evidence

To conclude, I will catalog some financial regulation options that would help rejuvenate the media sector and end the era of derivative media. It’s almost comical how simple some of these changes would be to make from a legislative perspective. Remove a line here, reinstate a rule there. Of course, the difficulty is not the formulation of regulations, but the power struggle over earning the votes to enact that legislation. The ­financial sector employs a veritable army of lawyers and lobbyists. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 455

Categorization

• QUESTION: Testable: how many derivatives regulations were actually blocked by lobbying, and can reform really be as simple as ‘remove a line here’? Worth checking costed analyses.
• XREF: connects to: Post-2008 financial reforms left the system’s core infrastructure unchanged — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 25; Financialization resulted from deliberate deregulatory political choices, not market forces. — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 17; Extreme bills are introduced as positioning, not lawmaking — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 84 (+1 more)