Financial Regulation, the Gulf Oil Spill, and Privacy on Facebook

1. FINANCE

Congress passes the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs John Berlau on what’s wrong with the bill.

“[The bill] should be called what for what it is: pages and pages of massively costly, counterproductive and possibly unconstitutional mandates on nearly every type of business except for those government-sponsored enterprises at the root of the crisis. And while the bill claims to crack down on excesses on Wall Street, its harshest impact will likely be on Main Street businesses that had nothing to do with the crisis.”

2. ENERGY

The New York Times chronicles the economic fallout from the BP oil spill.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President Iain Murray on why the U.S. government is partially to blame for the spill.

“[Government restrictions] push the oil industry into deep waters, where it is so much more difficult to fix a blowout than in shallow coastal waters, where there is still plenty of oil. Allowing more onshore and shallow-water drilling would lessen the chances of an accident like this considerably.”

3. TECHNOLOGY

Pundits argue that Facebook is changing the social standard for personal privacy.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Information Policy Analyst Ryan Radia on how the market will punish or reward Facebook for its privacy policy.

“The private sector must compete to win over consumers. When companies make privacy mistakes, their customers go elsewhere. [. . .] Ultimately, social networking is not about walling off information, but about sharing it with others. In the fast-moving information age, balancing the competing goals of privacy and information sharing is difficult, if not impossible.”